Vegan

A utilitarian and an egoist can often align on what is "just" so long as the pleasure of some action outweighs the pain it inflicts. Of course there's no actual way to measure X pleasure or Y pain, but people will make claims to how much pain/pleasure they get in some scenario and use it as justification for whatever they want.

We'd agree that the pleasure of egg consumption is small, but I know many people who will say things like "I can't give up cheese" or "I can't give up eggs". They'll go as far to say the only pleasure they get out of life is eating food, and that no amount of suffering could outweigh the raw pleasure they get in a utilitarian calculation.

Since there's no proper test we can do to say "no you're only getting 4 units of pleasure but you're inflicting 80 units of suffering for that egg", all we can go on is people's own judgement about their own pleasure, and their guesses about the pain they inflict. It's a very ad-hoc and non-principled approach, that anyone can use to justify anything so long as they say they've hit some required pleasure threshold.

This is all an argument against utilitarianism, not negative utilitarianism specifically, which does alleviate some of these issues. You'll still come up against moral issues that deontological ethics can solve but negative utilitarianism cannot (e.g why is it unethical to kill a person who has no connections and whose death will not produce any negative utility in the world). A rule utilitarian would say yes this is fine ethically, but the rule should be that killing is unethical because that'll produce the most positive utility/least negative utility. This would allow people to justify isolated murders so long as it's not setup as a rule for society that murder is okay, and that the murders produced no negative utility (e.g painless killing methods etc.).

As for more practical considerations in regards to animals, I'll allude back to my point about being unable to actually quantify pleasure/pain units. Someone right now might say that a "family farm" of chickens is ethical because the positive utility outweighs the negative utility of the chickens, unaware of the kinds of pain the chickens go through or the maceration of the baby males required to allow the females to survive in a profitable environment. But you might be able to find a more "ethical" form of exploitation that you might find okay that still produces negative utility that you just don't recognize as such.

The safe way to go about the world is to recognize the rights of these animals the same way we recognize the rights of humans. Whether you want to call them natural rights or human-constructs, it doesn't matter. These animals shouldn't be exploited for their byproducts even if we can't find any negative utility being inflicted. Life is always going to have some kind of suffering in it, so veganism usually implies an antinatalist stance for non-human animals. As a negative utilitarian yourself, you should recognize that we don't have the right to birth animals as they might experience negative utility as a result of our exploitation, even if we try our best to mitigate it.

I See your point but I don't agree. Saing vets are not interested in animal welfare is like saying doctors are no interested in human welfare.

In a perfect world people will not have pets. I don't now where you are from but here we have a big problem with homeless dogs and cats. Its because of people like her the animals on the street are having a better life and preventing from more animals ending the same way.

From me is important the difference that a person is able to make. Not selling food will not change anything because people are going to buy it from someware anyway. Saving few hundred animals makes a difference.

Hi, just to let you know that I, too, once thought I could never give up animal products. I used to eat a shit load of meat and cheese almost every day. But then after one Christmas a couple of years ago I stopped (at least with the meat, I became vegan later on).

At first it was kind of difficult, because I had to come up with new / more / other meals to eat. But after a few weeks I got used to it and looking back, I realize that it was actually very easy - at least much easier than I initially thought. There's so much in the way of replacement products nowadays. Seriously, if I could do it, you can too. It also helps to not think "does this dish taste like the animal product version?" and instead think "is this dish tasty?"

As for the hive's (still funny to me) rules, we try to keep the "coddling" to a minimum. I've heard this strategy of activism referred to as baby steps. I'll try to side step that to avoid the rule since your thoughts are very interesting and you put a lot of effort into responding here.

Activism and Baby Steps

I think all or nothing messages can push people away who would be willing to take some action, but not fully commit, and maybe be counter productive even if it’s cognitively easier to square.

Something I remember hearing a while back as a bit of a confrontation was to change the group we are harming in our actions to see if that changes how we see how we act. For example, swap the following two actions.

A. "I kill 4 animals a week for my food. I can opt not to, but that is not what I am used to and I like this."
B. "I went to the animal shelter and killed 4 dogs for food. I can opt not to, but that is not what I am used to and I like this"

It seems like an unfair comparison, even one made out to "get" people in some sort of ethical snare, but the situation is virtually the same. Dogs and normally farmed animals have no real difference separating the two and we can opt to not kill either. In fact, dogs can and have been farmed and killed quite recently. Some are vocally upset that people have tried to stop them from doing so as it seems extreme to them for others to stop them.

Now What?

All of that being said, I understand what you mean by it being hard to change. We can look at anyone with an addiction to a substance and just tell them to switch, but we as humans are horrible at changing and there are often other factors that hold people back from doing what they ought to do.

You mention, that you would never be able to give up meat, cheese, etc. But the thing is, you don't really have to. We, as animals, love the taste of umami, acid, salt, sugar, etc. These are just biological phenomena brought forward from our genetics to get us to consume food with vitamins, minerals, and macronutrients we need. But a vegan diet doesn't have to give those up. Vegan foods throughout history have been made from whole foods and are delicious (especially coming from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia).

Also, modern food science has made cheap, and often reasonably healthy, vegan alternatives to many of the things you are worried about. Just today, I consumed a homemade pizza made with spicy chorizo (made from gardein be'f crumbles) and daiya cheese (not a healthy meal, but you get my point). Hell, there are several restaurants that carry these options on their menu if we're feeling lazy. We can cook scrambled eggs, omelets, or breakfast sandwiches with Just Egg as well. Granted, my family avoids these products and only uses them for special occasions as we opt for more whole food options, but these ones in particular are low in saturated fat and sodium - making them reasonable processed foods to consume regularly, even when compared to their animal counterparts.

If you ever want some options for your favorite foods, my partner and I love to experiment and try what is best, both in store, at restaurants, and at home. We haven't found anything that cannot be reasonably replaced yet. I also study nutrition and am more than willing to help out with any worries you might have there.

I choose not to refer to myself or other people with philosophical terms. I prefer to use the words to describe specific arguments. Basically a person can make a deontological argument without referring to themselves as a deontologist. I think the scenarios of life are diverse enough that a person may find one way of reasoning more applicable in a certain realm and another in another. Or you could even want to justify an action with multiple arguments. Sometimes, I make deontological arguments for my social relationships but I don't commonly use them outside. I often find utilitarian arguments useful, but they also have their limitations.

I didn't enjoy giving up wool when I became a vegan because I was a needlefelter. I also don't think anyone can deny that wool is a material with great properties.

But in the reality of the world we live in, and specifically for me, my use of wool is potentially tied up with a system of live transport. Typically when animals used for wool reach the end of their lives, they're packed up on ships in a brutal manner and sent to be processed for meat. I'd hate to make a mistake and accidentally support that, either by making an errant purchase or stochastically inducing someone else to buy wool who would likely buy it from that system instead of mutualistic scenarios.

I don't really have a enough of a problem with someone buying secondhand wool to protest it. There are products that I purchased before becoming vegan that I'm using until the end of their lifespan.

Personally, I don't necessarily have a problem with mutualistic relationships between animals and humans, such as we see in certain sanctuaries. I'd be willing to evaluate moral decisions in such situations on a case by case basis. But I do think that in today's climate, animal welfare is just a smokescreen for animal exploitation. So many people justify eating meat from CAFOs with the idea that they buy from family farms some percentage of the time. The urgency for me is to stop the massive exploitation than to entertain edge cases, and the way to do that is to advocate veganism.

As to whether it would be morally neutral for me to eat an egg from a backyard hen in specific scenarios, perhaps it is. I just don't really see why I would, when I don't have any real reason to. I think that feeding eggs from rescued hens to other rescued animals is potentially justifiable, although I would want to learn more and rule out alternatives before I would confidently vote yes that its ok to do it.