I got this in my mailbox a few days ago and it is still reverberating around in my brain.
It is not about veganism but the author's dive into ethics and compassion make it adjacent. It includes a philosophical/ethical thought experiment, something that we have discussed in other threads. And it makes a case against Utilitarianism, which is the ethical philosophy that most closely corresponds with veganism.
Anyway for your reading pleasure and thought provoking, here it is.
It is not about veganism but the author's dive into ethics and compassion make it adjacent. It includes a philosophical/ethical thought experiment, something that we have discussed in other threads. And it makes a case against Utilitarianism, which is the ethical philosophy that most closely corresponds with veganism.
Anyway for your reading pleasure and thought provoking, here it is.
In his book What We Owe to Each Other, the philosopher Tim Scanlon (who you may know if you’ve watched The Good Place) outlines a thought experiment I’ve found myself mulling a lot recently:
"Suppose that Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm, and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones’s injury will not get any worse if we wait, but his hand has been mashed and he is receiving extremely painful electrical shocks." (page 235)
The question, Scanlon writes, is, “Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over? Does the right thing to do depend on how many people are watching — whether it is one million or five million or a hundred million?”
His conclusion, and I imagine most people’s, is that you have to save Jones, no matter how many people are watching and would be inconvenienced by the delay. No amount of pleasure from the viewers can outweigh the pain inflicted by shocking Jones over and over and over again.
In the context of the book, Scanlon is making an argument against utilitarianism and other moral theories that would ask us to weigh the aggregate pleasure millions of people get from watching the World Cup versus the acute pain felt by Jones.
But I think the thought experiment is illuminating outside that context. In particular, it has changed the way I think about interacting with people on social media.
The price of the casually cruel Twitter mob
Think for a second about how many people you’ve made fun of on Facebook or Twitter in your life. Maybe the answer is “nobody,” in which case I envy your self-control. But there’s probably somebody, and even if you didn’t do the mockery yourself, you can probably remember the objects of mockery.
Think of Caite Upton, 2007's Miss Teen South Carolina, who gave a famously bungled answer to a question about Americans’ lack of geography knowledge. Or think of the tabloid mockery of Britney Spears during her “meltdown” around the same time, the cruelty of which was recently highlighted in a New York Times documentary.
Then there’s the time Arkansas resident William McNabb, in response to a pro-gun-control tweet, defended his gun rights by asking, "How do I kill the 30-50 feral hogs that run into my yard within 3-5 mins while my small kids play?"
The tweet went viral, and a year and a half later … I still love the feral hogs meme. I even wrote an article about it. But McNabb almost immediately reported getting harassment and violent threats. I don’t doubt it. When thousands of people are talking about you, some of them are going to be violent, abusive jerks.
And even lighthearted mockery, with no violent or abusive intent, can be painful. Upton, the former Miss Teen South Carolina, told New York Magazine in 2015, "I definitely went through a period where I was very, very depressed. … I had some very dark moments where I thought about committing suicide. … It was awful, and it was every single day for a good two years."
So my question is, how is what we, collectively, did to Upton different from what happens to Jones, the TV station employee being electrocuted so millions can continue to enjoy the World Cup?
The only possible justification I can think of for blowing Upton’s answer into the cultural phenomenon it was is for the pleasure or joy of people watching it. We all got to laugh at her and get a bit of dopamine doing so. The price was that she became severely depressed to the point of suicidal ideation.
This is different from the question of the propriety of “public shaming” raised by authors like Jon Ronson. Public shaming is about people who did something bad, whether it be minor (like a Twitter joke perceived as racist and insensitive) or serious (like fabricating Bob Dylan quotes for a nonfiction book). The question there is whether the punishment fits the offense, and whether the chaos of the internet can ever allow us to calibrate that punishment appropriately.
But in Upton’s case, there’s no crime, metaphorical or otherwise. She didn’t hurt anyone or do anything morally wrong. Same goes for Britney Spears and William McNabb; I may disagree with McNabb’s views on gun control but there’s nothing wrong with sharing your opinions. All three of them were relentlessly ridiculed not as punishment for something, but just because it made the ridiculers happy.
A less cruel world
I normally try to make this newsletter about stuff that’s super cosmically important, like global poverty or the fate of the human species. This doesn’t rise to that level of importance. But I fear these kinds of problems are going to only get more pervasive, and our collective response of “c’est la vie” is going to get less and less acceptable.
In the 1960s, Americans were scandalized by psychologist Stanley Milgram’s (disputed) finding that research subjects were willing to subject innocent people to electric shocks, simply because an authority figure told them to. It might be more scandalous that we’re willing to subject innocent people to electric shocks for nothing more than our own amusement.
—Dylan Matthews, @dylanmatt
