1. Negative utilitarianism, consistently applied, recommends eliminating all beings capable of suffering, or at minimum reducing consciousness until nothing registers as loss.
This is not true.
I’m planning to write an article about it and I’ll link it when it’s done.
In short, what you’re saying is a common confusion between a moral claim (what we ought to do) and an axiological claim (what is the value of some states of affairs).
There are views of wellbeing where the monks you describe would precisely reached a wellbeing of ‘zero’.
For example, Simon Knutsson talk about that here.
bruh
I’m not sure about that. What makes you so sure?
Why?
Countries which had their developpement level increase have increased their exploitation of non-human animals. See for example the explosion of factory farming in Chinaoverthe last decades.
To me, your statement is simply false, unless we were only talking pets, but that would be silly since they are in such a minority.
Moreover, I’d argue that the reverse is correct: making progress regarding the animal exploitation would benefit hugely human beings for several independant reasons:
Climate change: The animal exploitation is one of the main driver of climate change.
Health: Animal agriculture constitutes a huge risk of catastrophic pandemy.
Famine:
Humanity is raising and killing 90+ billion land animals each year, yet there is somehow still human people starving eventhough they are only 7 billion. For one example, it is estimated that “replacing all animal-based items in the U.S. diet with nutritionally equivalent plant-based alternatives would free enough land to feed an additional 350 million people”
Talk of “speciesim” that implies animals’ and humans’ lives are of ~equal value, seems farfetched to me.
I have yet to hear someone defend that. So far, everytime I have heard this idea, it was from a speciesist person who failed to understand the implication of rejecting speciesism. Basically just as a strawman argument.
The amount of suffering is orders of magnitudes above in the cause area of animals.
Thanks for the reply.
One of the issue I had with the term minimalist is that it has another meaning. But as you said “the descriptor ‘minimalist’ can refer to minimalism regarding how many fundamental assumptions a theory requires”, so basically the other meaning actually applies.
I should add that we ultimately decided to reduce the emphasis on value commensurability in this book, because the value commensurability argument for minimalist views was not so centrally relevant here, wasn’t laid out in sufficient detail yet, and might work better as its own separate argument at some point. But the book still refers to it in a few places.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean in this paragraph.
EDIT: now I get it
And I agree that the word ‘minimizing’ might be easily associated with typical consequentialism thinking so it might indeed not be the best.
The term “minimalist axiologies” specifically refers to minimalist views of value: views that essentially say “the less this, the better”.
I wonder, why did you go for the term “minimalist”?
Wouldn’t “minimizing axiologies” work better?
So instead of just asking his gut how much he cares [...], he shuts up and multiplies.
I like this sentence.
I think advocating for veganism is utilitarian when you write a book that’s going to be read by many
Done.
I’ve noticed the website says “450 cm² is roughly the area of: About one-third of an A4 sheet of paper”
That’s not correct. A A4 sheet of paper has an area of 623.7cm².