#namethetrait

Name The Trait Argument Debate Dr Avi vs Josh

Daniel Dennett is quoted, “There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view I hold dear.” For me, that view is veganism, and there's no worse argument for it than #NameTheTrait.

There are of course other poor arguments for veganism, but those are usually either silly and easily dismissed as appeals to nature or gross-outs ("Chicken periods"), or more openly based on ethical concepts that most people don't agree with (like equal-rights deontology) but would otherwise more or less follow from that.  #NameTheTrait is different in how professional it looks to a layman, and how sneaky its hidden premises really are.

The argument has taken flight on youtube with large vegan channels like Vegan Gains using and promoting it in debates, and an understanding of why that is can provide a little insight into its problems: #NameTheTrait claims to be a silver bullet of vegan argumentation.  It is promoted as something that avoids all of the difficult homework involved in a good empirical argument, and beyond that claims that it even works no matter what your views on morality are (even for subjectivists) as long as you think humans (or even just you) have moral value.

Isaac Brown, the author of #NameTheTrait, said:

All the vegan argument requires is logical consistency and a personal belief in human moral value, veganism will follow logically from that position ... the objectivity or subjectivity of morality is irrelevant. Unless you deny the importance of logical consistency then veganism will follow.

It's an extraordinary claim.  Is there any evidence for it at all?  Well, no.  Plenty of assertions, and no evidence.  However, while that which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence, that won't necessarily help you in a debate, where the burden of proof can be unfairly shifted from the perspective of the audience by asking the pointed questions the argument is designed to ask.

The argument itself comes in two parts, and this is a guide to responding to and dismantling the argument in debate if you ever come across it.  A more complete break down of all of the problems with the argument is available here:

https://philosophicalvegan.com/wiki/index.php/NameTheTrait

#NameTheTrait is presented as follows:

Argument for animal moral value:

P1 - Humans are of moral value

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to deem ourselves valueless.

C - Therefore without establishing the absence of such a trait in animals, we contradict ourselves by deeming animals valueless

Argument for veganism from animal moral value:

P1 - Animals are of moral value.

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value.

C - Therefore without establishing the absence of such a trait in animals, we contradict ourselves by considering anything short of non-exploitation (veganism) to be an adequate expression of respect for animal moral value.

You may notice some superficial similarity to Peter Singer's “argument from marginal cases,” but it doesn't run very deep. (This is discussed a little more on the wiki.) As outlined in the Philosophical Vegan Wiki, both parts of #NameTheTrait are riddled with logical problems, and neither conclusion follows from its premises.

However, if you come across this argument, trying to explain how it fails logically in any detail (like the missing "identity of indiscernibles" premise) is probably not useful to correct your opponent (who won't listen) or for any audience (who may not understand).

A better approach in debate is probably to "steel-man" the argument, and treat it in the way the presenter thinks it works.  Go ahead and assume all of those sneaky hidden premises, and use the most generous possible interpretation of every term.

Even go so far to assume the first conclusion is correct, because you probably already agree it is: Most animals are not valueless.  But be sure to be clear: Most animals have some moral value.  Not equal moral value to most humans.

Even the creator of the argument (Isaac Brown) and Vegan Gains agree with this, and they regularly share images like this:

If you're arguing with them or anybody who learned it from them, there probably won't be any disagreement on that point.

From there, the second half of the argument "Argument for veganism from animal moral value" falls apart because P2 is misleading to the point of being a non sequitur:

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value.

P2 implicitly sets up an all or nothing false dichotomy of completely having or completely lacking the trait, but not all traits are like that: most come in degrees. And that includes traits that could give moral value (like intelligence, sentience, consciousness, language ability), and if those traits come in degrees, so can the moral value that they give: a notion supported by images like that above. Varying degrees of moral value could have different implications for treatment.

The traits bestowing moral value are thus not absent completely, but come in varying degrees (which does not contradict the conclusion of the first half of the argument, or the premise in the second).

If we map no moral value at all to 100% exploitation acceptable and no consideration for interests, and human moral value to 0% exploitation acceptable and full consideration for interests, animals would fall on a spectrum between the two points.

This spectrum makes room for animal welfare: when you accept some exploitation of an animal, but also limit that exploitation in some ways to avoid certain levels of extreme violations of interests.

Nothing in this argument demands "non-exploitation" (called veganism in the argument).

There are a couple ways (branching into different options) your opponent may try to answer this, so I'll go from easiest to most complex:

1. Your opponent may deny that a spectrum of moral value equals a spectrum of exploitation.

Such a denial will likely be based on claims that, "You wouldn't accept being exploited if you had less moral value" (drawing from the assumptions in the hidden premises).

However, as it stands (and without stating those hidden premises), P2 in the second half of the argument "Argument for veganism from animal moral value" is obviously and intentionally in the same broken form as P2 in the first half of the argument "Argument for animal moral value":

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to deem ourselves valueless.

vs.

P2 - There is no trait absent in animals which if absent in humans would cause us to consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value. If one implies absolutes, then so does the other.

If a gradation of moral value (from zero to human) must be interpreted in the second P2 as requiring absolutes of exploitation vs. non-exploitation from any non-zero value at all, then the same gradation of other traits (moral-value-giving traits) does the same in the first half of the argument with respect to moral value, meaning all animals that have such a trait in any degree have the same moral value. 

To put it another way:

IF a fruit fly, with its low moral value, would also not deserve "anything short of non-exploitation" as an adequate expression of respect for fruit fly moral value, then a fruit fly with under 200k neurons and its barely non-zero intelligence would–IF intelligence is the trait giving moral value–have the same moral value as an Einstein.

This is obviously absurd, and it results in a dogmatic view of value like this diagram the #NameTheTrait advocates often show as an example of what they disagree with... 

If your opponent wants to follow this line of reasoning, that is contradicting the agreement on the first conclusion, as well as the teachings of the #NameTheTrait guru.

If your opponent tries to claim that P2 in the second part of the argument is special and creates a valid dichotomy (so any moral value at all forbids any exploitation at all) where P2 in the first part creates a spectrum (such that smaller amounts of moral giving traits can grant lesser amounts of moral value), this should be easy enough to reveal as an absurdity for any audience present even without a deep understanding of the logical fallacies involved in the argument.

This is the easy win.

2. Your opponent can claim that it's not the permissibly of exploitation that varies on a spectrum, but the wrongness of the exploitation.  So exploiting humans in the same way is more wrong than exploiting animals, proportionally along the spectrum of value.

This is simply not how the argument is formulated:

"deem ourselves valueless" in the first half of the argument corresponds to: "consider anything short of non-exploitation to be an adequate expression of respect for human moral value."

As the first half deals with amount of moral value, the second half deals with what level of exploitation is acceptable.  It says nothing of degrees of wrongness, and to do so would explicitly make some meta-ethical commitments the argument is meant to avoid.

According to the belief in a moral spectrum by the formulator, we should deem ourselves to have less value (just not none) if a moral giving trait is present to a lesser extent, and likewise we would consider something short of non-exploitation (just not 100% exploitation) to be an adequate expression of respect for a lower level of animal moral value (a level under human moral value).

Even in the conclusion there are no claims of moral wrongness, only "contradiction".  While a double standard in itself isn't a logical contradiction, which is why these contradiction claims are incoherent, the point of the argument is to leverage subjective beliefs about value and demonstrate "inconsistent" application based on those beliefs to humans/the self vs. "animals".

Advocating improved welfare for farmed animals is consistent with this unless the #NameTheTrait advocate is willing to bite the bullet and overtly promote a particular meta-ethical system.

But let's assume your opponent does just that, and bites the meta-ethical bullet.  He or she throws out or radically alters the #NameTheTrait argument, and pushes forward with the idea that it's the wrongness that varies on a spectrum and not the acceptable level of exploitation -- what do you do?

If the argument were that the wrongness varied by the harm, you'd probably be stuck.  I agree with that, and in a good argument it leads to nuanced discussion about consumerism and agricultural impact.  Usually plants win... sometimes they don't.  And veganism is probably a pretty decent heuristic (at least to start with).  Radical reducetarianism and other forms of minimalism are good ones too.  The formulators and promoters of the argument don't want to go there, though.  They want to show how veganism is THE moral baseline, and this doesn't do that.  Such an argument doesn't substantiate just going vegan on its own because there's no hard line when it comes to harm delineating veganism in itself from other low impact lifestyles, and we might be compelled to do more than just be complacent vegans (we might even need to be critical of our palm oil butter and our bleeding edge gaming rigs with multiple screens, for example).

If you get into that discussion, you're far enough away from #NameTheTrait that it's beyond the scope of this guide, and by that point you're probably dealing with much more reasonable arguments.

But if the argument is that wrongness stems from exploitation?  That one is easy, because this brings us to a way in which P2 is false: We don't consider non-exploitation to be the baseline for respecting human moral value, whether we are considering the broad or narrow sense of "exploitation".  Unless we're radical Marxists, we admit MANY pragmatic exceptions to human exploitation.  Even in our own lives, most of us tolerate having our own labor "exploited" for a wage, which earns the companies we work for a profit.  To the extent that we are worried about exploitation at all, what we're worried about is harmful exploitation (exploitation in the more narrow sense), but only when that harm exceeds pragmatic benefit.  Non-exploitation is impossible in the modern world, and we exploit humans and animals constantly.  That's probably OK as long as it's more beneficial than harmful overall.

Arguments revolving around minimizing of the broader sense of exploitation don't stop at veganism, and they extend politically into quite radical socialist and social justice theories: radical social justice is the only thing that comes close to providing a consistent basis for the last thread of their argument... which is pretty ironic, since both Isaac Brown and Vegan Gains are vehement "Anti-SJWs".

If you are ready to ignore actual harm and go down the rabbit hole of deontological social justice politics, you might have a lot to discuss, but that's not something most people are on board with. If you can show that's the only direction these arguments lead, most people will realize this has nothing to do with any notion of morality as they see it, and they'll lose interest in #NameTheTrait or whatever vestiges of it remained to be argued.  From my perspective, I don't think it does veganism a service to tie it to such a controversial political ideology.

And that's it.

Of course that's not the only way to dismantle #NameTheTrait, but it is probably the easiest given the pretty common agreement that animals have at least some moral value.  Attacking the first part of the argument "Argument for animal moral value" on logical grounds is pretty simple (it is a non sequitur, see the philosophical vegan wiki for more detailed explanation of its problems), but arguing that the premise of animal moral value in the second part is wrong is much more difficult and not something I can help with (you'd probably need to look into social contract or deontological bases for moral value).

Hopefully this guide has been helpful.  The sooner logically incoherent arguments like #NameTheTrait can be put to rest, the sooner we can have productive dialogue on ethics and the future of human food and resource use.

All I ask is that you don't take the trainwreck of failed logic that is #NameTheTrait to be indicative of the best arguments veganism has to offer; it's the absolute worst, it's just promoted as the best by some well meaning but very confused vegans who haven't learned to be skeptical of things that are too good to be true yet.

– By Philosophical Vegan