Confused about Unnatural Vegan's video: Re: Why are vegetarians annoying? (making no-meat the new normal)

[tfstweezer]

In Unnatural Vegan's video Re: Why are vegetarians annoying? (making no-meat the new normal), while critiquing Hank's comment that, while he could go vegan, he could also do various other things to better the state of the world, she says this: “We can objectively say that an action is good (moral), bad (immoral), or neutral (amoral). We can point to something like eating meat like Hank does and say that is immoral based on its consequences. It is bad, objectively bad, for sentient beings including ourselves. And we can do the same with other actions as well, like buying tickets to see The Force Awakens instead of using the money to give to people in need. It's a selfish act obviously so it's not moral, but it's not harming people either so it's not immoral, it's amoral, it's neutral.”

However, I don't find this classification very convincing. For example, take this scenario: Image that person A has been given a bet: They will receive a prize worth $5000, iff they shoot a person in the head that would otherwise continue to live a normal life. Person B faces a similar choice: they can either donate $5000 dollars to an effective charity (For example, take the Against Malaria Foundation. According to Peter Singer's Charity Impact Calculator, $5000 dollars is more than enough to save a life. For now, assume that we know this with 100% certainty.), or they spend those $5000 dollars on the prize that person A would have received. Assume that the prize does absolutely no good or harm.

In this case, it seems that from a consequentialist perspective these two scenarios are equal. In fact, it might be argued that it would be better for person A to take the bet and kill the person than it would be for person B to spend the money on the prize, for person A does not need to spend their own money. However, by taking the bet, person A would clearly be causing a large amount of harm to a sentient being. By Unnatural Vegan's classification above, this act would be deemed immoral. On the other hand, person B is not causing any direct harm, and thus their action would be deemed amoral.

Am I misinterpreting what Unnatural Vegan is saying? Maybe, I really don't know. I would appreciate if someone could clear this up for me. Thanks

[dapto]

You've just identified one of the problems of consequentialism - it fails to first define what a "good" is before arguing for it.

[brimstoneSalad]

We can talk about harm and help in very objective terms. When we get into judgement of actions, it becomes more complicated.
We can talk about one action being better or worse than another, yes, but there's not always an obvious point to look at and establish neutrality so the spectrum can be normalized.

One point we can consider is this: what if we weren't here? If we didn't exist?

Harm we cause would be avoided, but so too would the help we give be left undone.

"Image that person A has been given a bet: They will receive a prize worth $5000, iff they shoot a person in the head that would otherwise continue to live a normal life."

If person A did not exist, supposedly that wager would never occur and this person would never be shot. The action of shooting the person is bad, the action of not doing so is neutral.

"Person B faces a similar choice: they can either donate $5000 dollars to an effective charity (For example, take the Against Malaria Foundation. According to Peter Singer's Charity Impact Calculator, $5000 dollars is more than enough to save a life. For now, assume that we know this with 100% certainty.), or they spend those $5000 dollars on the prize that person A would have received. Assume that the prize does absolutely no good or harm."

If person B didn't exist, nothing would be donated and nobody would be saved. The action of saving the person is good, the action of not doing so is neutral.

In the broadest sense, we can compare actions to a baseline like that and call them harmful, helpful, or neutral.

HOWEVER, that doesn't tell us everything we need to know about character, because circumstance means a lot more there and in many ways failing to do good is bad, particularly if it's very easy for you to do that good.

When we judge character, we're pitting goods against bads based on the circumstances and the ability of somebody to do some, and we're also evaluating the efficacy of that judgement itself.
We have to ask things like "Is it useful to call this person a bad person in order to motivate more people to adopt moral practices and make the world a better place?"

The "moral, amoral, immoral" spectrum of action classification is probably useful, but it is not in itself fair to judge people on that basis alone because some people are just in a position to commit more moral actions or are forced to commit more immoral ones despite their character potentially being innately better and more self-sacrificing.


So, to summarize:

Objective harm vs. benefit
Evaluation of actions as good, bad, or neutral based on a null baseline
Evaluation of character, which is an entirely different can of worms.