Reddit reviews Living High and Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence

Why is "I get paid less than you do" a reason to want to downvote? The average person in India or China makes less than $100 a month. Should they downvote you for making 20x that much in America (I assume America since you don't have health insurance)?

We all have things we don't deserve. Parents love you? Fuck you, there are people without parents! Grow up speaking English? Fuck you, English is hard to learn for people not born in the Anglosphere!

We all consume much more of our income than we have to. Morally speaking, we should all be consuming about $10k a year and giving the rest to saving lives in the developing world. But we don't. You don't. So why get into a "working-classier-than-thou" pissing contest with anyone who is paid a high wage?

As others have pointed out, if the basis for being vegan is utilitarian -- the idea that we ought to reduce suffering as much as possible -- then it's very easy to each the conclusion that our current lifestyles are unjustifiable along many dimensions, because we could reduce more suffering by, say, donating to charities instead of going to the movies.

You may be interested in Living High and Letting Die (1999) , which explores these ideas. Peter Unger, the author, argues that we operate under and "illusion of innocence" with respect to our developed-world behavior. He thinks we should donate much larger portions of our income to organizations like UNICEF.

There are a number of reviews and critical responses to the book. Many are behind paywalls, but I could grab some if you're interested.

It's worth pointing out that if you are not utilitarian, it's a bit easier to avoid the conclusion that you ought to give everything away to feed the children and such. Kantians and deontologists more generally are usually much firmer in negative duties not to positively harm others, and far fuzzier when it comes to positive duties to aid others. So you could argue that, while it is good to aid others, we are not in general obligated to aid others as much as possible; we just cannot harm them directly or exploit them.

This doesn't get them completely off the hook, though. For one, we do rely on exploitative labor practices around the world for the goods we enjoy. If the vegan argument that buying something that was built off of harm/exploitation works for animals, there is no reason it shouldn't work for human beings, too. There are also other ways we are harming others in the developed world. The argument gets easier to make the more it becomes obvious that climate change will most gravely affect the poorest and most vulnerable populations of the world, and that members of the developed world disproportionately contribute to that.

More generally, one might also argue that our current stance toward much suffering is a form of "ommision" (e.g., letting die) that is a form of harm, and so subject to Kantian/deontological prohibitions, in the same way that deliberately not running in to save a drowning child in front of you is a form of direct harm. It's just that the child is starving, and far away, and requires money instead of someone who knows how to swim, none of which are morally relevant factors.