Statement on "Negative Utilitarianism," "Efilism," and "Antinatalism,"

Stop it.

When I helped run the the "Vegan Circlejerk" Reddit community we were always firmly anti-utilitarian. Utilitarianism is a nonsensical, murderous, carceral, western philosophy that espouses using impossible math to come to conclusions. The wrong way to approach the world is to attempt to do equations and decide on your approach based on nonsense regardless of your intent for the "greater good." We and the communities I've helped moderate have always believed in doing the right thing. Acting in accordance with your belief will bring you the result you want.

After my crew and I stepped down from Reddit, that community was steered towards antinatalism. I am personally against this and want to have this community come to consensus against it as well. I have no right to tell other people what to do with their bodies. For some I believe this philosophy is a way to control women's bodies and set impossible standards. For others I believe it to be an expression of frustration and depression. Neither of these are in the spirit of abolitionist veganism and it will never become a prerequisite for it. Additionally the antinatalist philosophy is exclusionary to people who already have had kids which, when you get to my age, is most people. The admin of lemmy.vg is the same person who brought this philosophy to the subreddit, I would hope that recent events would encourage them to remove this link. To be clear if you decide having children is not for you that is great. I also came to this conclusion. I also don't believe everyone who promotes people coming to their own decision is a bad person or doing the wrong thing if that includes not having children. It is when we demand people do not that it becomes problematic.

By extension these other utilitarian adjacent philosophies can be found within our movement and it is time to formally denounce it. The point of veganism and leftism is to promote life, not rally against it. The point of veganism is to elevate all life to the consideration that is supposed to be enjoyed by humans. The point of leftism is to ensure that all humans are elevated to that status too and protect each other. When we adopt philosophies that are anti-life, anti-birth, anti-woman, anti-human we lose touch with this and it is the seed from which ur-fascist thought grows.

What happened in Palm Springs is a tragedy. They were not bringing the fight to capital which oppresses us all, it brought the fight to people we are in solidarity with against capital. It was not bringing the fight to the soldiers of the settler regime, it attacked the entrapped. It was essentially a murder suicide from a depressed person who needed solidarity and community. Our vegan communities are doing a disservice promoting misanthropy to our comrades.

Please if you agree or disagree leave your statement in the comments. Thanks.

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Anti-natalism fails to pass a very simple vibe check because it targets predominantly the global south. When people are talking about "exponential population growth" they rarely talk or mean
. I will not be able to put it better than it already had been at https://hexbear.net/post/99029, which is how !chapotraphouse@hexbear.net's "anti-nautilism" rule came about.
Also I keep hearing bad things about Singer but haven't actually looked into it.
- any anti natalist that isn't focused on promoting sex ed and healthcare is a clown lmao.
  Internet antinatalism is a bad joke.
  Singer is a mixed bag, some of this writing is deeply thought provoking, some of it is stupid as hell bordering on evil. Like he promotes veganism, unless you are faced with a unique "cultural experience". Then murdering someone (who is obviously worth less than you, you big brained uni educated man you) for said experience is ok. Once.
  Shit like that reads like the literary equivalent of pulling a napkin over your head so god can't see you gorge yourself.

I realize I didn't share my stance on antinatalism, which is probably super telling. It's so far removed from my life and experiences I simply don't think about it that much lol.
In my perfect world there would be no unwanted pregnancy or forced birth. The quiver full movement is wack as fuck. Both forcing people to give birth and giving birth to people to have them be your little soldiers are abhorrent behaviors to me.
I have never wanted to have children so I don't understand that part of the human experience. I don't think it's inherently moral or immortal to want to and succeed in procreating. I don't know enough about the topic (and don't think internet antinatalists do either) to try and tell people what they should be doing like that. I don't think there is a net good to me or anyone else that I was born but I also don't think it's that deep 🤷🏻‍♀️

I 100% agree with your stance on antinatalism, but I'm confused about condemning utilitarianism. I don't know if I'd call myself one, but certainly I fall into the broader category of consequentialism rather than deontology, that is, the morality of an action is determined by the consequences you can reasonably expect that action to have, as opposed to morality being about abiding by a set of rules and fulfilling moral obligations. To me, as a vegan, this is fully compatible with a vegan perspective, consuming animals or animal products leads to the consequence that animals will suffer, and I don't want that to happen, so I don't do it.
I don't see how utilitarianism in general would imply antinatalism. You could make a utilitarian argument for it, I suppose, but it's possible to "make an argument" in favor of just about any position from just about any moral framework. That doesn't mean that the framework actually implies that position. It's fair to critique utilitarianism, but I don't think it's appropriate to draw a hard moral line against it, because individual utilitarians can still be good people who agree on specific issues like veganism, like being against antinatalism, etc. There are good and bad people who subscribe to just about every broad philosophical framework like that.
Moreover, I'm not sure what moral framework you're proscribing here.

This is the first I have heard about the incident in Palm Springs. Everything I read about it seems to presume I would know who is against fertility clinics but I can't figure it out. Would be grateful if someone could clue me in. (I thought that the current flavor of US fascism supported fertility clinics. I know some religions are against it but seems unclear who would do it, especially without a statement.)
My take differs from what Hamid posted slightly - but it could also be me reading too much into it, lol! I read this statement as presenting life as inherently good an joyful, something to be enjoyed.
I personally view it as neutral. It just is. It is not inherently good or bad, there is no meaning. But paired with that is a fiery opposition to treating some life as worthless or as a source of commodities. To me, life has no meaning but fuck anyone who tries to impose meaning on any being through their authority. Examples include capitalism (workers lives are to produce value for the capitalist), patriarchy (people who can give birth's lives are to produce workers), carnism (animal lives are here to extract commodities from). Also fuck everyone who withholds the requirements for life (access to food, water, clean air, community).
The point of veganism is to elevate all life to the consideration that is supposed to be enjoyed by humans. The point of leftism is to ensure that all humans are elevated to that status too and protect each other.
This is probably just semantics and me being way too literal in my thinking but the above is where my veganism and leftism is centered and it is so without the idea of "promoting" life. We're here, we're alive, and we all deserve to live in peace, comfort and community.
Utilitarianism assigns value in an arbitrary manner based on the observers values and that's super wack to me.
- The Palm Springs guy didn't do it for religious reasons, he was a weird vegan elifist anti-natalist pro-mortalist. He posted a manifesto.
  
  Thank you so much for explaining it! I just checked major news sites and there was nothing, just that it was "terrorism".

I think laying out the consensus you wish to arrive at sort of undermines the idea of reaching a consensus.
I have strong leanings towards utilitarianism but recognise that it is, at least at this point, incalulable and therefore extremely open to bias. That said I am unconvinced that virtue ethics is not open to exactly the same problems. Many people who do awful shit follow that too. My conclusion thusfar is that making grand statements of ethics is an insane thing to do and if you're ever faced with a bunch of screaming people while you're "doing the right thing" maybe you're not and you should chill.
I think an ethics that ignores that an enormous amount of suffering is experienced by living beings is naive. There is a lot of agony in the world. If you conclude from that the idea that we currently are ready to play god well then you're a bit stupid. While it's nice to imagine a form of life where motivations are determined by gradients of pleasure (the usual goal of serious negative ethics systems) humans will more than likely never be capable of doing this.
I don't think you can really claim leftism is pro life so much as pro people. If people exist we should take care of them. I don't thing this has any particular valence towards or against making more humans. Many humans desire to make more humans, but this isn't really a good argument for making more humans. It's essentially the same argument for breeding animals for pets.
I have no way of assessing whether the average human life has negative or positive moral valence and I am deeply sceptical of anyone who claims they can determine that.
Edit: I want to add a source which is a survey of philosphers, it has this interesting table of results.
Normative ethics: deontology, consequentialism, or virtue ethics?
Other 558 / 1803 (30.9%)
Accept or lean toward: consequentialism 435 / 1803 (24.1%)
Accept or lean toward: virtue ethics 406 / 1803 (22.5%)
Accept or lean toward: deontology 404 / 1803 (22.4%)
from: https://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl?affil=Philosophy+faculty+or+PhD&areas0=0&areas_max=1&grain=coarse
As we can see professional bigly thinkies are quite split. I would caution against wholesale adoption of rejection of any particular system of ethics.
- I'm laying out my position and hope people agree. If this isn't what people believe then I think I've failed at building the community I want to be a part of.
  
  I can understand being skeezed out by people who flirt with justification for murder. Weird cults like zizians and so on. Murderous rage and arrogant paternalism are pretty disgusting tendencies that lead to bad places.
  Wanting to police the means by which people reach the conclusion we should care for everyone on the planet seems unnecessary to me.
  Like does it bother you that I think the way I can have the largest positive impact in my life that is practicable is by being vegan, instead of believing that idk avoidiing violence is virtuous therefore I should? I've met lots of people with the latter belief who just make others do the killing, Buddhist monks failing at their own standard of ahimsa for example.
  It's not clear to me that the virtue ethics framework leads to more consistent results given that almost everyone who follows it is a murderous monster willfully pursuing their own pleasure at the expense of thousands of meaningful beings.

I've not seen antinatalists say that there's anything specific to be done about the people already on this planet. It may be an adjacent idea, but not one that's included in the definition or concept of antinatalism. That said, there are more impactful ways of bringing good into the world even compared to adopting, like giving lectures, releasing videos, or even talking to people online. The reach, the effort/result, or the risk/reward ratio are just significantly higher than raising one or more kids, who may or may not listen, like everybody else. You could call that utilitarian, but regardless of whether it really is, someone who's not yet born has no value from either philosophical perspective.
PS. A woman giving birth is always riskier for her than the opposite, so that's something to consider in evaluating which, if any, position is against women.

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