You saw the counterarguments section “The human health gains are small relative to the harms of animals”, but presumably missed that the next section was titled “The health costs don’t matter, no benefit justifies the horror of farming animals”, and made that exact counterargument rather than responding to Elizabeth’s preemptive response.
I did read Elizabeth’s preemptive response to the counterargument. However, her preemptive response doesn’t seem to actually argue against the counterargument, so I didn’t see any need to address it. I wrote my earlier comment to highlight that the counterargument is decisively strong—the health costs of veganism are scarcely worth discussing.
If you’d like to volunteer a consideration I may have missed, I’m all ears! However, Elizabeth’s preemptive response you mentioned doesn’t try to rebut the counterargument at all. Instead, it calls the counterargument a “fair argument for veganism”, and lists some tangential considerations which I didn’t find relevant enough to address in my earlier comment:
But it’s not grounds to declare the health costs to be zero.
The argument doesn’t do that. It just says they’re so small relative to the harms causes to animals that they’re scarcely worth discussing.
It’s also not grounds to ignore nutrition within a plant-based diet.
The argument isn’t about that at all, and I think most people would agree that nutrition is important.
The argument isn’t about that at all, and I think most people would agree that nutrition is important.
It sounds like you’re misreading the point of the article.
The entire point of this article is that there are vegan EA leaders who downplay or dismiss the idea that veganism requires extra attention and effort. It doesn’t at all say “there are some tradeoffs, therefore don’t be vegan.” (it goes out of the way to say almost the opposite)
Whether costs are worth discussing doesn’t depend on how large one cost is vs the other – it depends on whether the health costs are large enough to hurt people, destroy trust, and (from an animal welfare perspective), whether the human health costs directly cause more animal suffering via causing ~30% of vegans to relapse.
You saw the counterarguments section “The human health gains are small relative to the harms of animals”, but presumably missed that the next section was titled “The health costs don’t matter, no benefit justifies the horror of farming animals”, and made that exact counterargument rather than responding to Elizabeth’s preemptive response.
I did read Elizabeth’s preemptive response to the counterargument. However, her preemptive response doesn’t seem to actually argue against the counterargument, so I didn’t see any need to address it. I wrote my earlier comment to highlight that the counterargument is decisively strong—the health costs of veganism are scarcely worth discussing.
If you’d like to volunteer a consideration I may have missed, I’m all ears! However, Elizabeth’s preemptive response you mentioned doesn’t try to rebut the counterargument at all. Instead, it calls the counterargument a “fair argument for veganism”, and lists some tangential considerations which I didn’t find relevant enough to address in my earlier comment:
The argument doesn’t do that. It just says they’re so small relative to the harms causes to animals that they’re scarcely worth discussing.
The argument isn’t about that at all, and I think most people would agree that nutrition is important.
It sounds like you’re misreading the point of the article.
The entire point of this article is that there are vegan EA leaders who downplay or dismiss the idea that veganism requires extra attention and effort. It doesn’t at all say “there are some tradeoffs, therefore don’t be vegan.” (it goes out of the way to say almost the opposite)
Whether costs are worth discussing doesn’t depend on how large one cost is vs the other – it depends on whether the health costs are large enough to hurt people, destroy trust, and (from an animal welfare perspective), whether the human health costs directly cause more animal suffering via causing ~30% of vegans to relapse.
this sounds like you believe the health costs of veganism are unfixable without animal products. Is that the case?