Consistency as the Only Moral Currency
Alex O'Connor's 21st birthday quarantine livestream — recorded during the pandemic lockdown that replaced his planned Amsterdam trip with a bedroom Q&A — sprawls across dozens of topics in the way only unscripted conversation can. But beneath the rambling super-chat responses, a single philosophical commitment surfaces again and again: the demand for ethical consistency. It is the thread connecting his views on veganism, abortion, utilitarianism, the monarchy, and even lab-grown meat.
The most substantive exchange begins when a viewer tries to extend O'Connor's vegan philosophy to the abortion debate, arguing that opposition to animal suffering logically requires a pro-life position. O'Connor rejects the neat syllogism, but not by abandoning his principles. Instead, he insists the two questions operate on different moral scales:
When we kill an animal or a nonhuman animal we are inflicting upon them the most important and highest imaginable suffering for the most unimportant and trivial kind of pleasures for human beings — that is taste pleasure — whereas when it comes to something like abortion you've got the same kind of suffering being inflicted, if it is something that can feel pain, but that's not being weighed up against something as trivial as taste. That's being weighed up against bodily autonomy.
This is a more careful position than critics of utilitarian ethics often credit. O'Connor is not dodging the question; he is arguing that the weight on each side of the moral ledger differs drastically between factory farming and pregnancy. The suffering-minimization framework does not change — only the inputs do. Whether that framework can actually bear the weight of both cases is another matter. Critics like Don Marquis have argued that future-of-value accounts of the wrongness of killing apply to fetuses in ways that resist simple utilitarian balancing. O'Connor does not engage with that literature here, though as a second-year philosophy student at the time, the omission is forgivable.
The Lab-Grown Meat Test
A viewer challenges whether lab-grown meat is ethical, given that it still constitutes "animal bodies." O'Connor's response reveals how tightly his ethics are bound to sentience rather than to any categorical prohibition on animal products:
Veganism to me is an ethical philosophy about minimizing suffering. It's not just animal products bad. It's the same reason why somebody might eat roadkill on the side of the road and that might be fine... What we care about is suffering. So if lab-grown meat causes no suffering then I don't see the problem.
He then offers a reductio that is sharper than it first appears: one might as well grow a plant in the shape of a pig and declare it off-limits. The point lands because it exposes the difference between a deontological "animal products are inherently wrong" stance and O'Connor's consequentialist one. If no sentient being suffers, the molecular composition of the food is morally irrelevant. This is a genuinely clarifying move in a debate that often collapses into tribal signaling about purity.
Utilitarianism and Its Discontents
The livestream's most philosophically dense passage arrives when O'Connor tackles the classic torture hypothetical — whether a person who derives more pleasure from torture than the victim derives pain is justified under utilitarianism. Rather than biting the bullet or retreating, he invokes David Benatar's asymmetry thesis:
I do agree to an extent that suffering counts more than pleasure does. I wouldn't take five minutes of the worst suffering imaginable if it meant that I got five minutes of the best bliss imaginable. I don't think they're worth the same. A life of 50% suffering and 50% bliss is not a neutral life.
This is a significant concession. By granting that suffering and pleasure are not symmetrical quantities, O'Connor escapes the most notorious utilitarian reductios — but at a cost. He is no longer operating with a simple hedonic calculus. He is implicitly introducing a weighting function that privileges the avoidance of suffering over the pursuit of pleasure, which edges him closer to negative utilitarianism, a position with its own famously uncomfortable implications (such as the argument that painlessly eliminating all sentient life would maximize the absence of suffering).
He also cites Roger Crisp's "rash doctor" thought experiment to argue that probability must factor into utilitarian reasoning — that a 1% chance of full recovery does not outweigh a 99% chance of near-full recovery. This is a standard move in decision theory, but O'Connor deploys it effectively to counter the accusation that utilitarianism is naive. The danger of utilitarianism, he argues, is not the philosophy itself but the failure to apply it with sufficient nuance.
Veganism Without Political Baggage
When a viewer suggests that veganism naturally aligns with leftist politics, O'Connor pushes back with a historically grounded analogy. He acknowledges that radical movements tend to emerge from the left — using Chesterton's fence as his framing device — but insists on decoupling the two:
We need more Tory vegans, in other words, is I suppose what I'm trying to say... Veganism is not a matter of leftism. Veganism is just a matter of justice, and in the same way that anti-racism started in left-wing circles — that's where it came out of, you know, abolitionism and things like this — now being an anti-racist is not seen as a left-wing thing.
This is strategically astute. By framing veganism as a justice issue that transcends the political spectrum — much as abolition eventually did — O'Connor avoids alienating potential converts who happen to hold conservative economic views. Whether the analogy fully holds is debatable; the structural critique of industrial agriculture often implicates capitalist modes of production in ways that anti-racism does not necessarily implicate any single economic system. But as a rhetorical move aimed at broadening the coalition, it is effective.
Bottom Line
Stripped of its birthday pleasantries and super-chat acknowledgments, this livestream reveals a young philosopher whose central commitment is not to any particular conclusion but to the principle that moral positions must be internally consistent. O'Connor applies this standard to his interlocutors — pressing a vegetarian viewer on why dairy gets a pass, challenging a leftist viewer's assumption that veganism requires socialism — but also to himself, openly admitting uncertainty on abortion while insisting that whatever answer he reaches must cohere with his broader framework. The philosophical substance is real, even if the format is casual. The limitation is that consistency, by itself, is a formal virtue: one can be consistently wrong. The harder question — whether suffering-minimization is the right foundational principle — remains largely unexamined here, taken as axiomatic rather than defended. For a 21-year-old thinking out loud in quarantine, that is perhaps the right place to start.