Activism for good causes: often morally wrong? w. Tobias Leenaert

Are activists who fight for a good cause with a bad strategy on the hook morally? The episode begins with a striking thought experiment which suggests the answer may be ‘yes’.

The episode also asks: Are hard-line approaches to activism ineffective? What can the case study of extreme vegan activism tell us? And what are some principles for a successful activism? 

This episode includes an interview with the strategist Tobias Leenaert, a writer on activist strategies and founder of a global charity. The episode covers direct action protests, idealism, compromise, the emotions of activism, catharsis and community, kindness in communication, the methods of anti-slavery abolitionists, and Max Weber’s thoughts on how to make the world a better place.

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Podcast website for contact details and more: surprisingethics.buzzsprout.com

Instagram: @surprising_ethics_podcast tinyurl.com/surprisingethics 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Allow me to give you a slightly unlikely thought experiment that contains the seeds of quite a provocative argument against some activism. This guy's out for a walk, call in Michael. When in the distance he sees a hundred people tied down to a railway line. And on a separate track, he also spots a further one person tied down. He sees two runaway trains coming, one on either track. And so within a minute, all 101 people will be dead. Unless Michael can do something, and he realizes that all he can do is to put his own outstretched arm onto one of the tracks to slow down the train so that the train stops before hitting the people. But there's a big gap between the tracks, so he can't stop both trains. He can either save the one person or the a hundred. And let's suppose that he's not under a moral obligation to save anyone, given how costly and awful it would be for him to lose his arm. Michael considers his options, and then he chooses to sacrifice his arm after all. But to save the one person, letting the a hundred die. There's something morally off about this, right? This is basically a thought experiment given by the philosopher Theoran Pummer. Now we can extend this kind of thought to activism, and say that activists who are well meaning but unstrategic, and who have little hope of doing serious good, might be somewhat similar, morally speaking, to Michael, the bad rescuer, who saves one when he could have saved a hundred. Because some activists do some good, but they could be doing a whole lot more good, or they could have a good shot at doing that. And so are they on the line, morally speaking, in a similar way to Michael? In this episode we ask, do people who go out of their way to fight for a good cause in fact do wrong when they campaign in ways that are unpromising and unstrategic? Are many activists in the real world indeed doing a bad job? Which should we prioritize conviction or strategy? And what are some principles for a morally sound and promising activism. This is the podcast that always promises you a surprising and stimulating idea about ethics or politics in every single episode. Thanks to the Centre for Research in Ethics, an academic centre based in Montreal, for their continued support of this podcast, and thanks to you, the listener. It's so good to be able to see that I am not doing this alone, and a sense that you care about philosophy and how it can improve and enrich our world. So today our topic is activism, and I have a really interesting interview near the end with an activist and theorist of change. But as always, we begin with the status quo, the dominant majority view on our topic before looking at a surprising alternative. So the status quo seems to be that activists are sometimes laudable, but sometimes either useless or irritating or exasperating, especially if they disrupt normal life or are hypocritical. But according to the status quo, even if we're right to criticize some activists in these respects, activists who fight for a good cause don't do anything wrong against those who they fight to protect. So to illustrate the status quo, uh let's turn to the comment section on some YouTube videos depicting activists from Just Stop Oil, a UK-based environmental group. So the first set of comments respond to a video where a protester jumps onto a snooker table during a live broadcast and throws some orange powder all over the snooker table.

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Oh, give me a break. The narcissism of these people is limitless. He should be made to pay all the spectators whose night he's ruined. He did it. He stopped oil. The dye that makes that powder orange was made from oil.

SPEAKER_00 4:24

Okay, and the next set of comments are on a video showing a bus driver ramming into protesters who are trying to stop the bus.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Buy that driver a beer. Winner of the best driver of year award. The arrogance of these protesters is unbelievable.

SPEAKER_00 4:44

So these comments give us some evidence about what a lot of people think. Oftentimes people are irritated by what they see as the disruption caused by activism, and they're keen to make out issues of hypocrisy wherever they can. But there's no suggestion here that it's those who depend on the environment who are wronged by these environmental activists. That's not part of the kind of common critique of activism. But the surprising alternative kind of drops this stuff about hypocrisy and so on and focuses instead on a different sort of critique. So the alternative view says, look, activists often act in a way that's morally compromised because of their effects or lack of effect on those they fight to defend, on those they're standing up for, and whose cause they're taking on. So perhaps surprisingly, it's the very individuals that these activists fight for who have the moral complaint against the activists, even though they're putting in even though they're often voluntarily putting in time and money into trying to defend their interests. So applied to the just stop oil case, the idea is that the just stop oil people might be getting out of bed in the morning precisely to fight for people whose lives or welfare depends on a stable climate. But it's those people who are most vulnerable to climate change who actually have the strongest complaint against those activists. If and because they could be doing a much better job. So the episode has three parts really. Firstly, we ask, is being a bad activist morally criticizable? And is it like being a bad rescuer, Michael, in the train case? Secondly, we'll get into a case study of bad activism on a topic to be revealed. And thirdly, I have a chat with the strategy activist and writer Tobias Leanot. So the starting point for this surprising alternative view, which I concede as quite provocative, but if you're an activist, do bear with me. Is the analogy with Michael. The rescuer who saves one, not a hundred. Now I admit from the outset that the analogy is loose. There are differences between the cases. Clearly, Michael is much more blameworthy than less effective activists are, and clearly we'd be we'd be much more concerned about Michael's kind of personality or whatever, but but we're focusing on the actions themselves, not the individual and their level of blameworthiness. So I think the case of Michael on the trains does point to a valid case against some activists. Because the train case illuminates a kind of general principle. And this principle applies when you have three options. One, you can help no one because it's quite costly to help. Two, you can help those who need it just a little bit, or three, you can help those who need it a lot. The principle says that if helping only a little bit is basically just as costly as helping a lot, then you should help a lot, morally speaking. The principle allows that if it's really quite costly to you to help, then you have no obligation to kind of maximise good consequences by kind of sacrificing your own interests a lot. But if you're taking on the cost anyway of helping others, where there is a cost, then it seems mistaken to only help a little bit when you could basically just as easily help a lot. And the the Michael case and these principles are basically just adapted in small ways from Theoran Palmer's 2016 journal article on donations to charity. And a quick aside for those who know more about the kind of technical details of ethics, the argument doesn't presuppose consequentialism, the idea that morality is just about maximising good consequences. I guess the core idea instead is don't refuse to help others if that would be almost pointless. Okay, so what can my critic say? Someone who wants to defend the activists I'm speaking about, someone who wants to diffuse any interesting parallel between Michael's actions in the railway case and the actions of the kind of less than ideal activist. So one important difference might be: well, look, in the train case, there's this clear and gigantic difference between the two rescues. Right, a difference of saving 99 extra people from dying, from being crushed by a train. But in the activist case, that's that's never true. Individuals just don't have that kind of power. Right? Becoming an activist for your local political party and knocking on doors to chat to voters doesn't have the power to save 99 people's lives. Okay, but in in reply, uh firstly, the point is kind of general, right? So saving lives is only an example. It would also s it would also be a bit strange to help only one person overcome a non-lethal issue like unemployment when we could just as easily help 10 or 100 people overcome unemployment. But to but if we wanted to stay with the idea of saving lives, we can still apply this reasoning to groups of activists. So a group of activists, a kind of charity or a campaign group or a social movement done badly, might still be just as bad, really, as the bad rescuer. Because campaigners against, say, climate change or animal abuse, they might be trying to save hundreds, thousands, even millions or billions of lives, at least over a big time period. And so whether they do a good job could be like whether some group of Michaels in the train case do a good job or a bad job. Alright, but here's a second objection to my argument, a second way of defending the less strategic activists against any idea that they're like Michael, the train rescuer. In the train case, what Michael does is gratuitous, right? It's completely needless. He just throws away 99 lives for no reason. But there are reasons, right, on this line of thought, why activists engage in the kind of campaigning that some might call unproductive. They're trying to remain true to their values. So-called unproductive activists are keeping the flame of resistance lit. And that has symbolic value, and that's all they can be asked to do. They can't be held responsible for how others react to their actions. For example, how the tabloid press misrepresents them or how people choose to remain willfully ignorant about the messages behind their protests. So I want to start my reply by digging a bit deeper and getting a better grip on this conflict of ideas by drawing on Max Weber, the celebrated German sociologist. So in 1919, he delivered a lecture called Politics as a Vocation, and he drew a distinction between the ethics of conviction and the ethics of responsibility. The ethics of conviction is about staying true to your values at all costs. Whereas the ethics of responsibility says you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your actions. And these two different ways of looking at activism or politics diverge when holding on to integrity might lead to bad outcomes. And in that case, the ethics of conviction says I do what I believe to be right. And if the sky falls, it falls. All I can ensure is that I stay true to my values. And the ethics of responsibility says we have to take responsibility for what follows from our actions. And it's wrong to stick with the apparently principled action if that will cause really bad consequences. So I think that a pure ethics of conviction seems morally compromised, and that we need some kind of hybrid between conviction and responsibility. So the main reason for this is that as an activist, one's trying to change the world. So we can't really forget about consequences because consequences are what makes up the world. In other words, consequences are how we we know if our world has been changed by activism or if it's been left entirely as it was in the state whose deplorability was the very reason we started being activists. Now someone might think that holding on to a principle like keeping promises or not lying comes above achieving good outcomes. The 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant held this kind of view, but I don't think it's the right view. Suppose someone comes up to you and your friend in the street, holds a gun to your friend's head, and says, Promise to wire me a million dollars next week or I'll shoot your friend dead. But you don't have a million dollars, right, in your bank, so you can't promise to send that money. So what do you say? Do you explain that you can't possibly make that promise? No, absolutely not, right? You you you have to lie, you have to lie. To allow your friend to be killed is to grossly overvalue the purity of your relationship to truth, it's to undervalue your friend's life, and we have no permission to do that. Truth is so important for so many reasons, but you can lie to this person to save your friend's life. A very brief aside, please do consider hitting subscribe or follow or sharing this with a friend. It's so helpful for this journey that I'm on with listeners like you to really try and encourage rigorous but entertaining philosophy and you thinking about our world and our politics. So thanks so much if you can do that. Now I'll raise one more point on behalf of the uncompromising idealist here. They might say, well, okay, that example is worrying, but the ethics of responsibility in its focus on actions, it's prepared to use dubious, even wicked means. And surely it can't be moral to engage in kind of dirty tricks or exploitation to bring about the so-called better outcome. But I'm not saying that any means are justified, or that the ends always justify the means. I'm not saying that we can kill a thousand people to kind of free up the funds to save two thousand people from avoidable disease. Yes, of course we have to respect rights and stay within critical moral boundaries, but sometimes we do seem to have a responsibility to alter our protest methods, the way we use our time, the tone of our voice, the flavor or messaging of our campaigns to achieve a better outcome. So the criticism against my argument is that so-called productive activists are keeping the flame of resistance lit. And this has symbolic value, and that's all they can be asked to do. They cannot be held responsible for how others react to their actions. For example, how the tabloid press misrepresents and distorts them, or how people choose to remain willfully ignorant about the message behind their protests. A brief aside, all right, so in part two, let's move to some actual real-world cases and the case study I promised. So I've argued that often if we're going to be activists, we should be more productive and more strategic rather than less effective. But what is the actual import of that claim, right? Like, are there actually lots of activists who are doing a bad job of strategy? Well, I think there are quite a lot. So I'm going to focus on a case I know more about, which is select vegan activists who adopt certain hardline attitudes or means. But many of these points will generalize to other more extreme activist tactics. Let me just say straight off the bat, to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, that I appreciate the case for radical change in light of animals' rights. And I've written academic pieces and pieces for a general audience, and of course podcast episodes which you might have already listened to, about animals and their claims and the prejudice that we human beings have against other animals. We're insulated psychologically from what's happening in every single minute. The animals that are being uh torn apart and made to suffer and killed for a typically insufficient reason. And I'm not going to undermine for a second the strength of the claims that those trillions of animals that we use and abuse every year have. But that doesn't mean that just any old way of fighting for animals or for veganism is going to be helpful or productive or morally defensible. Indeed, it's it's because the cause is so important that we cannot just select any old set of tactics. And it seems that a minority of vegan activists at least are quite unhelpful, or at least some of their actions are unhelpful, or at the very least, they leave gains on the table for animals and for humans. So here are two concrete examples. In 2025, activists from Animal Rising blocked the meat aisle in the Sainsbury supermarket in the UK, and they got rammed by customers' trolleys, including an old man and an old woman. You can see this on YouTube. And the activists were actually very successful at stopping the old people's sort of shopping trolley attacks, but they but they may have been less successful in their main in their main goals. The problem is that the people affected by this direct action were largely unaware of the issues that the activists wanted to raise. And therefore these shoppers respond with anger and with indignation because they don't understand why the moral issue is so urgent at 2.34 pm on a Thursday afternoon, that it licenses such disruption. They focus on the moral issue that they've been stopped from going about their business, that they're trying to cook dinner for their grandchild, rather than reading what's on the placards and engaging with that. And this is kind of a predictable and foreseeable result. If you directly interfere through unexpected channels, people won't accept it. Their emotions go sky high, and they find it psychologically very easy to dismiss you and the cause that you raise. Then the press gets involved, drags the activists through the mud, and strengthens this focus on the disruption. The disruption becomes the focus, deflecting from the actual issues that motivate the disruption in the first place. Another example is a kind of umbrella set of attitudes that I might call vegan policing. So some activists express hardline views when they say things like, you're not really a vegan, or you're not really acceptable unless you're also a vegan activist, or oh, he isn't a real vegan because he still has leather shoes from the past, or you shouldn't have non-vegan friends because they're animal abusers, or attacking people who are vegan but for health reasons, rather than trying to combat the harms we inflict on animals when we commodify them. These activists might do some good work, and I don't want to deny that. But this portion of their work, this aspect of their work, seems counterproductive. Consider first that activists need to persuade others. That is the route to change. But how do you persuade someone to become vegan or to support vegan adjacent changes to society? Well, it's not by presenting veganism as harder to achieve than it really is, implying that someone isn't behaving acceptably until the last vestige of animal product is removed from their house or from their loft or wardrobe or what have you. It's not by presenting veganism as requiring social sacrifice and as being incompatible with having any friends who don't share your exact lifestyle. And it's not by presenting veganism as requiring a kind of paranoid diligence about everything you do, lest you get called out by your fellow activists. But this is what this kind of activism, unfortunately, does. Unintentionally, I believe. It presents veganism as an unattractive option. And some might say in reply that these kind of hardline strategies worked on them, that they were kind of seeking truth or guidance or motivation and Being guilt tripped and kind of hit in the face with the facts worked for them. But they're not in the majority. It might work for some, but most people are not looking for some abrupt and forceful reality check. So if if this is right, then why do people believe that these hardline tactics are so productive? Why what explains that then? Well, first, I think they're very correct in being motivated by the awful urgency of animal abuse. It's unfolding every minute. But the trouble is the move from it's urgent to I should therefore act instinctively and very, very quickly. That doesn't work when the problem is created and defended by a complex social system of laws and institutions and cultural moral beliefs. And second, the awful situation to which activists respond kind of creates emotions in the campaigner. They want to create a better world. And the negative emotion that they associate with injustice gets dissipated somewhat by giving one's audience an impassioned and forceful speech full of hard truths, or by getting lots of retweets on provocative posts. This feels better in the moment and provides activists, I think, with a sense of progress and of inspiration. But that doesn't mean it's effective. Our emotions aren't reliable guides to whether we're having the best impact in a complex world. Now let me kind of concede that I run the risk in highlighting these issues of making vegans seem unappealing, right? Of kind of contributing to the problem that I'm complaining about. So let me say that most vegans are very thoughtful and empathetic and interesting people, right? And I should flag vegans who do an incredible job in this respect, people like Romesh Rankinathan, the comedian, or Lewis Hamilton, the champion F1 driver. But that's not the idea a lot of people might get because of the shop window laid out by a kind of minority. Now, I admit I could be wrong here. I admit that the psychology of activism is not my specialist area because I'm not a psychologist. But it does seem to be a kind of powerful line of thought that if you want to convince someone to join you, most people need social inclusion, friendliness, an attractive presentation of your camp to be won over. Most people, if they feel attacked, if they feel called out, are likely to want to find some flaw in your camp. They're likely to want to decide that they don't want to be like you. They're likely to spot and latch onto, or even kind of make up, some element of hypocrisy that apparently writes you off. And then their decision is settled by the emotions, not by the rational merits of the case at hand. Because like it or not, we're animals, we're social animals. As vegans, you know, recognize. We can be driven by emotions pretty strongly. And then it seems to be the responsibility of the activist to do things that might generate actual change, not just to hit and hope. And so it becomes a moral issue how we act as activists. And it might be that the very beings we're trying to help have a claim against our using bad strategies or no strategies at all. Because they're the ones who lose out when things go badly or opportunities are missed. But let me let me kind of recognise that there's an objection to my argument that emerges at this point. I've assumed there's no obligation to be an activist at all, if and because there's a sacrifice that's involved that's significant. But can't the less strategic, more feeling-based activist invoke a similar line of argument as to why they're not willing to go through the work of developing a good theory of change? They can say if the non-activist can play the effort card in explaining why they're not an activist, then I can play the effort card in explaining why I'm not some sort of strategizing activist. Right, not everyone has the headspace or the resources to prepare for some sort of technically informed meeting with state officials, but I do just about have the energy to fly the flag, to wear the badge, to go to the sit-in, to shout from the rooftops. And this is partly because these forceful expressions of community spirit give me energy, and I don't have the energy to develop a kind of flow chart theory of change or whatever. So, in reply, I'm not saying people should do more than they're capable of doing. But the point is, bracketing the cases where someone's really, really unable to do more, many people are able to do a better job without putting a whole load more effort in. People can use empathy and consult free materials from people like Tobias, who I'll interview later, and put more thought into their activism to make it a lot better. And I think there's nothing about strategizing that means that we can't find community and catharsis. Indeed, maybe in the medium or longer term, activists who have more success in their campaigning because of strategy actually have stronger and more durable community. But if we have to choose between catharsis and outcomes for the humans or animals for whom we fight, then the choice as activists seems clear because it's not about us. Uh apart from, of course, when it is about us. And I kind of want to bracket the case of what we might call kind of self-activism here or self-representation when someone's fighting for themselves and their own rights. And here I think it might be different. And the decision to reject careful strategy might be a more personal decision, and I think people might be more willing to understand why someone is very angry and not very strategic about their own representation for their own rights. But I'm talking about cases like most climate activists and all vegans who are in part or in whole defending other people and other beings and their rights. So before I bring in Tobias and have the chat with him, one final objection to my argument is kind of probably worth noting. And this is the objection. How dare you will criticize us so-called ineffective activists when there are billions of people sitting on their ass on the sofa doing nothing for any cause whatsoever, right? How is this on us? How can you say that we're on the hook? So, in reply, maybe we should concede after all that people who don't do any work of any kind towards making the world better, but who have the resources to do so are on the hook as well. So if we take the whole group of people who don't do activism, don't give to charity and so on, some of them have very good reasons not to do that. So that seems morally fine. And those who don't have good reason, it does seem that they're on the hook too. But still, to be off the hook, good intentions and putting hours in as an activist might not be enough. I guess because we can realise that it's it's difficult to make change and that we do often have a responsibility to actually make change as far as we can or to contribute to that as far as we can. And that does seem to take strategy. Okay, so part three of three. If we want to have a more effective kind of campaigning, how can we be productive activists, right? How can we be activists who change the world, or who at least have the best chance of changing part of the world? So for this question, I went to Tobias Linert, who's the author of the 2017 book How to Create a Vegan World, a Pragmatic Approach, which has been translated into 14 different languages. Tobias thinks about strategy and helps people, companies, NGOs, universities to develop better strategies for change. And he's also the co-founder of ProVeg International, a charitable body that aims to reduce the consumption of animal products worldwide by 50% by 2040. So yeah, uh, thanks very much, Tobias, for joining me. Um firstly, I wanted to ask about like what some general principles are that someone can turn to if they want to be a strategic activist, kind of no matter their cause area.

SPEAKER_02 30:36

Yeah, if you talk about strategic a strategic attitude in general, I would say that is about um yeah, effectiveness and pragmatism and doing things that work rather than doing the things that you think you should do because there's rules that say you should do it like that, right? Um so um, for instance, um you could be activist about a certain behavior or uh yeah, some certain change in society, and you could demonstrate that behavior very much yourself um to a fault in a way. So for instance, I would say that uh trying to be consistent across the board in terms of the behavior that's desirable to you um is not always a good thing. So, for instance, if you say, say you're a climate activist and you say, like, I'm never gonna fly because I I I think flying is uh is too damaging for the environment, but then if you would miss out on opportunities to do real good by flying, so you maybe go to a conference and you have a give an effective talk there, or you get inspired by being around those people and at that conference, um then I would say, yeah, don't don't prioritize that principle over the effect um your action might have. So that is that is one thing. Another thing would be to like um ask the things that you know are reasonable and doable rather than asking the things that are your ideal. So those are some just ideas of of of how you might approach being um yeah, effective or pragmatic as a change maker. One tip or suggestion or principle that you can always apply is is is what I call uh yanya, which is called, which which means you are not your audience, yanya. Um and um I think it's it's always really important to imagine what your audience is like, who it is, what they want, what their interests are, and put yourself in their shoes and not assume that they want the same as you. And that will already be um a very good tool to um to lead you in a more strategic direction because we're always like likely or prone to um yeah, spew out what we want ourselves, what our ideals are, what our ideals for or our arguments for action or for behavior change are, and we will project towards other people. Now, if we see that these other people are not like us in many ways, um, and we can approach things from their end, from their side, then that's already a very good basis for for pragmatism and compromises, I think.

SPEAKER_01 33:20

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 33:22

What does it's a very general question, but like from you, you know, I know I know you look at a lot of data on theory of change. What does that tell us? Does it tell us anything interesting beyond just what seems intuitive about how to make change?

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Yeah. Um, so we don't have, I would say, in enough data. We don't have enough data but theories, interventions that work. Uh, what I think I can confidently say is that there is more evidence pointing in the direction of more moderate asks that work, more um uh less radical messaging. For instance, in the case of uh my field veganism, um, if you say go vegan or otherwise you're a murderer, um, this kind of like absolutist um uh dialogue, and I'm putting it a bit extreme now, um, but um this will will more often, according to research, alienate people um if if you use guilt and and and shame. That might work in some some cases, but more often it seems to alienate people, and so we know that from research, and we can we can look at the research and and and consequently decide what approach is the best. And and here it's like really uh important to emphasize that like pragmatism here is a matter of choosing what you think uh from research or whatever works the best and not choosing on the basis of oh this fits me better. So for or this is like what I naturally lean to. Like, for instance, you mentioned hunters. Uh I with hunters I have a big uh problem being pragmatic. Like if I encounter a hunter who is shooting at that moment in the fields right next to me, I will get angry um and I will shout at him. And um that is not the most pragmatic thing to do. That is just something I at that moment I I almost can't control, but um almost a choice not to be pragmatic and to ignore the research, etc. So what I want to say here is like either you you agree with yourself that you're gonna go for what you think is most effective, or you're gonna say um intentionally or not, no, I'm gonna ignore this because this is a better fit for me. I don't think this is always wrong or this is always unavoidable, like in my case with the hunters. Um but um it's good to be aware of that at least.

SPEAKER_00 35:40

I must say it's very brave to start with someone with a lethal, a lethal weapon. Um but okay, and then just imagining a listener who's sort of maybe a bit new to the idea of being strategic, who's willing to to who's sympathetic to the idea, but is kind of concerned about uh compromising their values too much or kind of becoming involved in what they see as sort of dirty work. What are some types of some kind of modes of being pragmatic that uh are less controversial and that everyone should be willing to kind of give a go to, even if they want to kind of set aside being being highly, highly, highly strategizing all the way to kind of yeah, potentially saying things I don't agree with or something?

SPEAKER_02 36:22

Yeah, for first of all, if you talk about like the fear of compromising your values, um I would say that like for instance when I say something about meat reduction rather than about veganism, some other people might say you're compromising because yeah, you're about eliminating animal consumption and animal production, so you can't talk about reduction. Uh you can't talk about these incremental steps. But I'm thinking that like if I believe this is more impactful, then I'm not compromising because I'm doing it for the animal. So I'm trying always, I think another way of being pragmatic is to look at to look at it from the point of the the victims and look at what the pig that is locked up would want. And uh he or she would want me to be effective, they would not want me to be a purist. Um they would want me to do whatever gets them out of the cage, right? So um I think that's that that is uh another way of looking at it. I always tell people, activists in my area, um, who will tell me, like, oh, look, you can't compromise like this because anti-slavery abolitionists would also not have said, like, let's abuse the slaves or let's only have slaves on Monday or whatever, just like the Meatless Monday campaign says you shouldn't eat uh meat on Monday. But the fact is, um, these anti-slavery abolitionists also were very pragmatic and they had uh asks or interventions that were exactly about reduction of harm and incremental change rather than saying uh look, uh we have to abolish slavery today uh rather than tomorrow, even though they believed that. But they too they started by um asking things, having asks demands about the the the health of the British sailors on the ship rather than the enslaved people, or they were talking about uh the circumstances in which these enslaved people were on the boats. So uh that is very, very parallel to what in my movement of animal welfare and animal rights, uh many organizations ask, which is uh better, higher welfare for animals. Of course, you always have to keep in mind that there might be something like greenwashing or humane washing or or whatever. So um yeah, we we cannot like be happy with with changes that are too small in in the case you're talking about institution or whatever. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:50

Where the greenwash greenwashing and so on is like uh kind of just surface level, meaningless changes to try and get reputational enhancements for a company or whatever. Exactly.

SPEAKER_02 39:00

That's what you yes, yeah, to distract from the real issues, etc. So that that would obviously be not pragmatic, not effective, and damaging. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:07

So one one of the criteria I guess you have for like how how should I actually approach being pragmatic is like, I think, if I understand correctly, the degree to which most people already agree with your view. So like how how to what extent has the argument already been won in public? So can you talk about how whether a a view is is is dominant or is popular or is fringe affects how we should be pragmatic?

SPEAKER_02 39:33

Yeah, I think that um the public support, a certain intervention, a certain ask, a certain message has will determine how confrontational, et cetera, you can be with it. Like, for instance, if you want to protect cats, you can go a lot further than when you want to protect chickens, right? Um people will accept a lot more of you. Um I think that um there is quite a bit of an overlap for me between being pragmatic and being a good kind communicator and have good like palatable messaging, um, and and and using empathy and and and and kindness. And um I think that is in so many ways, in so many places appropriate. And uh, like you said, people might think that they're like betraying their values if they are like that. I always give the example of um or of Daryl Davis, who is um an activist, an anti-racism activist, uh, black man, um, and he uh befriended Ku Klux Klan people. Um and the idealist or the the the critic of this might say, like, yeah, we should not talk to these people, they're horrible. We should just completely ignore them and and boycott them and not have anything to do with them. But by having relationships with these people, he was able to convince hundreds of them to actually drop their ideology and to leave the clan. So he was effective by being very kind to people that um yeah, other people said you you have no business talking to.

SPEAKER_00 41:13

Great. Um I I don't think I have any more questions, but um yeah, is there anything you wanted to add at all?

SPEAKER_02 41:21

Yeah, maybe I can say like like um one one one easy way, especially for for animal activists, to um uh summarize what pragmatism is about. The question is is not um am I right or is this my truth, but um does this work? So it's not about like being right, it's not about like like um spreading your big truth with a big T to people. And I'm not again saying that uh people should lie, but there is uh often uh like um proneness of people to like speak their mind and to say like I have to like really say it the way it is and I have to tell them the truth, and that is more like almost more like an ego thing sometimes, like like at least I didn't lie and I was brave and I spoke the truth, and and that all of that is is is of secondary importance to uh how did your message arrive with the the the audience you intended for and did it do something among them? And and and this blatant, very vocal truth maybe can do something sometimes with some people, um, but often like um people need to hear it in a little bit of a softer way. So there is no this is maybe important to say, I think that that maybe the the the key to pragmatism is adaptiveness and and you know not have any fixed way to go about things. Um because if you have a fixed way, then you're almost uh dogmatic, I would say. So um, and this also means that like being more aggressive or being more direct or whatever can be the best way and can be the most effective way in some cases, but in other cases it will not be. And so the the ability to like distinguish between those and to to shift from one approach to the other, that flexibility is is I think the essence of being pregnant.

SPEAKER_00 43:10

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