I basically buy the arguments that the relative value of being vegan is small compared to my career (the strongest counterargument for me is that being vegan improves moral clarity)
Being vegan is really inconvenient for me for nutritional reasons, so I just avoid chicken and some eggs, the most suffering-dense foods. This is kind of an arbitrary policy but it does have ~0 cost and get me partial moral clarity + some sense of the moral clarity Iâm missing.
I think I would be at least vegetarian if I had a visceral disgust response to eating meat, like if I were raised vegetarian. But that doesnât mean I endorse it! Giving myself a disgust response now would be net bad for my impact, and I think Iâm consequentialist enough that this is most of what I care about. (edit: and Iâd also remove a disgust response if I already had one)
Realistically, I might eat the humans in this thought experiment, if this were as widely accepted as eating pigs and Iâd been raised with the custom. But maybe Iâd have a strong disgust response anyway, or maybe my current meta-policy would avoid human meat if I thought it were a very morality-dulling food. If it were more suffering-dense than chicken, or perceived as a high-suffering delicacy like foie gras or shark fin, eating humans regularly would be more morality-dulling because it would reinforce my identity as an immoral person or something.
If I had a disgust response to eating humans, this doesnât mean Iâd endorse it either! âIs human meat suffering-dense?â is different from âDoes the idea of eating human meat produces a strong disgust response?â is different from âis eating humans morality-dulling?â, and the last one is what drives my impact.
This thought experiment makes me update slightly towards eating meat being morality-dulling but probably not enough to change my diet.
Iâm (bival)vegan and basically endorse all of this (so strong upvote).
I happen to find the idea of eating animal products uncomfortable/âupsetting, feel that way when I order food (or someone else does so on my behalf) and it comes non-vegan, and am already managing my diet well with little inconvenience and Iâd guess no real loss in productivity, so there isnât much reason for me to start eating animal products again. But itâs less clearly worth it to pay the initial and possibly ongoing costs of going (almost) all the way vegan. âDisgustâ is too strong, though.
Iâm not sure I would give up my reactions of discomfort/âupset, though, in case theyâre an important source of ethical motivation for me. I generally find guilt/âshame more important for motivating big life changes. However, itâs also possible guilt/âshame cause me to give too much weight to the short term relative to the far future.
I think the virtues of moral expansiveness and altruistic sympathy for moral patients are really important for EAs to develop, and I think being vegan increased my stock of these virtues by reversing the âmoral dullingâ effect you postulate. (This paper makes the case for utilitarians to develop a set of similar virtues: https://ââpsyarxiv.com/ââw52zm.) Iâve also developed a visceral disgust response to meat as a result of being vegan, which is for me probably inseparable from the motivating feeling of sympathy for animals as moral patients.
When I was a nonvegan, I underestimated the extent to which eating meat was morally dulling to me, and I suspect this is common. It was hard to know how morally dulled I was until I experienced otherwise.
Realistically, I might eat the humans in this thought experiment, if this were as widely accepted as eating pigs and Iâd been raised with the custom.
Iâm sure you would, but this isnât actually relevant. The point is that from your current standpointâwhere you havenât been raised to think eating humans is OKâyou think the act is beyond the pale. This implies that when you are thinking clearly and without bias, you think eating other sentient beings is abhorrent. This in turn implies the only reason you eat meat now is that youâre not thinking clearly and without bias!
I donât think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldnât do the first one because itâs disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like thereâs a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
âł...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.â
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the âpositiveâ bin than the ânegativeâ bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said âItâs annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and itâs easier for me, so Iâll just do that.â?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didnât require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isnât the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, itâs the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didnât require slave labor
Is this true? I have heard the claim âthere is more slavery going on than at any point in historyâ, but know very little about this and how itâs defined. I would guess itâs hard for me to avoid this if Iâm going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldnât eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on youâI wasnât intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
On a consequentialist morality, feelings of moral outrage, horror or disgust are not what matters. (Instead, what matters on it is how to allocate attention/âwillpower/âdedication to reduce the most suffering given oneâs psychology, opportunity costs, etc.) In the original post, you say âThese are just biases though, and all they show is that we donât react badly enough to animal farming.â Consequentialist morality doesnât have a concept for âreacting appropriately.â (This is why, in Thomas Kwaâs answer, he talks about what heâd do conditional on having a disgust response vs. what heâd do without the disgust response. Because the animal suffering in question isnât quite bad enough to compete with alternative ways of using attention or willpower, going vegan isnât thought to be worth it under all social and psychological circumstances â e.g., it isnât thought to be worth it if itâs costly convenience-wise and/âor health-wise, if thereâs no disgust reaction, and if the social environment tolerates it.)
Since youâre primarily addressing consequentialists here, I recommend explaining why âreacting badly enoughâ/ââreacting appropriately to moral horrorsâ is an important tenet of the morality that should matter to us (important enough that it can compete with things like optimizing oneâs impact-oriented career).
Without those missing arguments, I think itâll seem to people like youâre operating under some rigid framework and canât understand it when other people donât share your assumptions (prompting downvotes).
For what itâs worth, I do feel the force of your intuition pump (though I doubt itâs new to most people) and I think itâs true that consequentialist morality is uncanny here, and maybe that speaks in favor of going (more) vegan. Personally, Iâve been vegan in the past but currently at the stage where I mostly buy the consequentialist arguments against it (provided I am really trying to reduce a lot of suffering), but still feel like thereâs some dissonance/âa feeling like Iâm doing something I donât want to do. I donât really endorse that on reflection, but the feeling doesnât go away, either.
Consequentialist morality doesnât have a concept for âreacting appropriately.â
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/âbad to each other in terms of their consequences. My thought experiment was simply designed to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. So however you react to one (whether it be with indifference, moral disgust causing you to abstain, or moral disgust that doesnât cause you to abstain) you should react in the same way to the other. If one has the thought âeating the humans is beyond the paleâ one should think âeating the animals is beyond the paleâ.
Itâs similar in flavour to Singerâs drowning child thought experimentâhe draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself âI would save the childâ, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself âI would walk past the child but would feel extreme guiltâ then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/âbad to each other in terms of their consequences.
This is only the case in an âall else equalâ situation! It is very much not the case when changing oneâs reactive attitudes comes at some cost and where that cost competes with other, bigger opportunities to do good.
Itâs similar in flavour to Singerâs drowning child thought experimentâhe draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself âI would save the childâ, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself âI would walk past the child but would feel extreme guiltâ then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
Same reply here: Singerâs thought experiment only works in an âall else equalâ situation. Depending on their circumstances, maybe someone should do EA direct work and not donate at all. Or maybe donate somewhere other than poverty reduction.
Yes. Isnât it true that people who go vegan at one point in their life revert back to eating animal products? I remember this was the case based on data discussed in 2014 or so, when I last looked into it. Is it any different now? Those findings would strongly suggests that veganism isnât cost-free. Since the way you ask makes me think you believe the costs to be low, consider the possibility that youâre committing the typical mind fallacy. (Similar to how a naturally skinny person might say âI donât understand obese people; isnât it easy to eat healthy.â Well, no, most Americans are overweight and probably not thrilled about it, so if they could change it at low cost, they would. So, for some people, itâ isnât easy to stay skinny.)
Maybe we disagree on what to count as âlow costs.â If their lives depended on it, Iâd say almost everyone would be capable of going vegan. However, many people prefer prison to suicide, but that doesnât mean itâs âlow costâ to go to prison. Maybe youâre thinking the cost of going vegan is low compared to the suffering at stake for animals. And I basically agree with that â the suffering is horrible and our culinary pleasures or potential health benefits appear trivial by comparison. However, this applies only if we think about it as a direct comparison in an âall else equalâ situation. If you compare the animal suffering you can reduce via personal veganism vs. the good you can do from focusing your daily work on having the biggest positive impact, itâs often the suffering from your food consumption that pales in comparison (though it may depend on a personâs situation). People have made estimates of this (e.g., here)! Again, the previous point relates to the same disagreement we discussed in the comment thread above. If someone does important altruistic work, everything that increases their productivity or priorization by 1% is vastly more important than going vegan. You might say, âOkay, but why not go vegan in addition to those things?â Sure, that would be the ideal, in theory. But in practice, there are dozens of things that a person isnât currently doing that could improve their productivity or prioritization by 1%, and those 1%-improvements would be a bigger deal in terms of reducing suffering (or doing good in other ways). So, unless one first implements all those other things, it doesnât make sense, on consequentialist morality, to prioritize personal veganism.
I admit Iâm getting confused. I think youâve moved into arguing that going vegan has low relative value or may not even make sense for a maximising consequentialist. In my thought experiment I was trying to be agnostic on these points and simply draw a parallel between eating mentally-challenged humans and animals.
If you want to say that going vegan doesnât make consequentialist sense for âreason Xâ that is fine. Iâm just saying that you then also have to say âif I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason Xâ. If you can say and mean this sentence (I expect many people can) then this thought experiment should not have an affect on your choices. To clarify I donât really judge such peopleâthey would be acting in a morally-consistent way which I think is one of the most important things in ethics.
Iâm just saying that you then also have to say âif I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason X.â
I agree with that. Some of your earlier comments seemed like they were setting up a slightly different argument.
Someone can have the following position: (1) They would continue to eat humans in the thought experiment world where oneâs psychological dispositions treat it as not a big deal (e.g., because itâs normalized in that world and has become a habit) (2) They wouldnât eat humans in the thought experiment world if they retained their psychological dispositions /â reactive attitudes from the actual world â in that case, theyâd finds the scenario abhorrent (3) When they think about (1) and (2), they donât feel compelled to modify their dispositions /â reactive attitudes toward not eating non-human animals (because of opportunity costs and because consequentialism doesnât have the concept of âappropriate reactionsâ â or, at least, the consequentialist concept for âappropriate reactionsâ is more nuanced)
I think you were arguing against (3) at one point, while I and other commenters were arguing in favor of (3).
As a non-vegan, hereâs how I think about this:
I basically buy the arguments that the relative value of being vegan is small compared to my career (the strongest counterargument for me is that being vegan improves moral clarity)
Being vegan is really inconvenient for me for nutritional reasons, so I just avoid chicken and some eggs, the most suffering-dense foods. This is kind of an arbitrary policy but it does have ~0 cost and get me partial moral clarity + some sense of the moral clarity Iâm missing.
I think I would be at least vegetarian if I had a visceral disgust response to eating meat, like if I were raised vegetarian. But that doesnât mean I endorse it! Giving myself a disgust response now would be net bad for my impact, and I think Iâm consequentialist enough that this is most of what I care about. (edit: and Iâd also remove a disgust response if I already had one)
Realistically, I might eat the humans in this thought experiment, if this were as widely accepted as eating pigs and Iâd been raised with the custom. But maybe Iâd have a strong disgust response anyway, or maybe my current meta-policy would avoid human meat if I thought it were a very morality-dulling food. If it were more suffering-dense than chicken, or perceived as a high-suffering delicacy like foie gras or shark fin, eating humans regularly would be more morality-dulling because it would reinforce my identity as an immoral person or something.
If I had a disgust response to eating humans, this doesnât mean Iâd endorse it either! âIs human meat suffering-dense?â is different from âDoes the idea of eating human meat produces a strong disgust response?â is different from âis eating humans morality-dulling?â, and the last one is what drives my impact.
This thought experiment makes me update slightly towards eating meat being morality-dulling but probably not enough to change my diet.
Iâm (bival)vegan and basically endorse all of this (so strong upvote).
I happen to find the idea of eating animal products uncomfortable/âupsetting, feel that way when I order food (or someone else does so on my behalf) and it comes non-vegan, and am already managing my diet well with little inconvenience and Iâd guess no real loss in productivity, so there isnât much reason for me to start eating animal products again. But itâs less clearly worth it to pay the initial and possibly ongoing costs of going (almost) all the way vegan. âDisgustâ is too strong, though.
Iâm not sure I would give up my reactions of discomfort/âupset, though, in case theyâre an important source of ethical motivation for me. I generally find guilt/âshame more important for motivating big life changes. However, itâs also possible guilt/âshame cause me to give too much weight to the short term relative to the far future.
I think the virtues of moral expansiveness and altruistic sympathy for moral patients are really important for EAs to develop, and I think being vegan increased my stock of these virtues by reversing the âmoral dullingâ effect you postulate. (This paper makes the case for utilitarians to develop a set of similar virtues: https://ââpsyarxiv.com/ââw52zm.) Iâve also developed a visceral disgust response to meat as a result of being vegan, which is for me probably inseparable from the motivating feeling of sympathy for animals as moral patients.
When I was a nonvegan, I underestimated the extent to which eating meat was morally dulling to me, and I suspect this is common. It was hard to know how morally dulled I was until I experienced otherwise.
Iâm sure you would, but this isnât actually relevant. The point is that from your current standpointâwhere you havenât been raised to think eating humans is OKâyou think the act is beyond the pale. This implies that when you are thinking clearly and without bias, you think eating other sentient beings is abhorrent. This in turn implies the only reason you eat meat now is that youâre not thinking clearly and without bias!
I donât think eating human flesh is beyond the pale or abhorrent. Eating human flesh that was produced with, say, 10 hours of suffering seems basically morally equivalent to eating flesh from humans who consent and are treated well, plus buying clothes that took 10 hours of slave labor to produce. And doing these separately seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career. Current-me just wouldnât do the first one because itâs disgusting and becomes more disgusting when associated with suffering.
It seems like thereâs a taboo on eating human flesh, and also a harm, and the argument is conflating the disgust response from the taboo with the immorality of the harm. Disgust should not always be extended to general moral principles!
âł...seems morally okay as long as the clothes allow you to have more positive impact with your career.â
Utilitarian calculations need to be justified beyond just piling up more things in the âpositiveâ bin than the ânegativeâ bin. An often used thought experiment is asking if it is ok if a doctor kills a healthy patient in a hospital to donate their organs to five other needy patients so that they may live. While utilitarians may justify this in the way you did, this justification looks unfounded if there is a recently deceased organ-donor in the morgue at a nearby hospital who could provide all those same organs. How is killing the healthy patient justified then? Would we see the utilitarian doctor as still justified if they said âItâs annoying to have to drive over to the other hospital, fill out paperwork, get the organs, then drive back. It is still a net positive to kill the healthy patient here, and itâs easier for me, so Iâll just do that.â?
Considering your analogy, it is easy to buy clothes that didnât require slave labor, and even if not, it is tenuous to see how a specific set of slave-produced clothes would have an overall positive benefit to your career greater than the suffering they incurred.
Bringing it back to animals, the equation isnât the negative of animal suffering against the positive of your career, itâs the negative of animal suffering against the marginal career cost, if any, of switching to a vegetarian or vegan diet, which is much lower. You can understand why many would see the claim that the animal suffering is worth it in comparison to marginal personal inconvenience it saves as dubious and particularly self-serving.
Is this true? I have heard the claim âthere is more slavery going on than at any point in historyâ, but know very little about this and how itâs defined. I would guess itâs hard for me to avoid this if Iâm going to a normal clothing store.
All my thought experiment is designed to do is to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. If we feel differently about the two that is likely to be due to various biases that are not morally relevant.
This might cause some people to rethink eating animals, as they wouldnât eat the humans. If you would eat the humans however then this thought experiment is unlikely to have an affect on youâI wasnât intending for this thought experiment to be relevant to everyone anyway.
Yikes, not a good lead/âlook!
On a consequentialist morality, feelings of moral outrage, horror or disgust are not what matters. (Instead, what matters on it is how to allocate attention/âwillpower/âdedication to reduce the most suffering given oneâs psychology, opportunity costs, etc.) In the original post, you say âThese are just biases though, and all they show is that we donât react badly enough to animal farming.â Consequentialist morality doesnât have a concept for âreacting appropriately.â (This is why, in Thomas Kwaâs answer, he talks about what heâd do conditional on having a disgust response vs. what heâd do without the disgust response. Because the animal suffering in question isnât quite bad enough to compete with alternative ways of using attention or willpower, going vegan isnât thought to be worth it under all social and psychological circumstances â e.g., it isnât thought to be worth it if itâs costly convenience-wise and/âor health-wise, if thereâs no disgust reaction, and if the social environment tolerates it.)
Since youâre primarily addressing consequentialists here, I recommend explaining why âreacting badly enoughâ/ââreacting appropriately to moral horrorsâ is an important tenet of the morality that should matter to us (important enough that it can compete with things like optimizing oneâs impact-oriented career).
Without those missing arguments, I think itâll seem to people like youâre operating under some rigid framework and canât understand it when other people donât share your assumptions (prompting downvotes).
For what itâs worth, I do feel the force of your intuition pump (though I doubt itâs new to most people) and I think itâs true that consequentialist morality is uncanny here, and maybe that speaks in favor of going (more) vegan. Personally, Iâve been vegan in the past but currently at the stage where I mostly buy the consequentialist arguments against it (provided I am really trying to reduce a lot of suffering), but still feel like thereâs some dissonance/âa feeling like Iâm doing something I donât want to do. I donât really endorse that on reflection, but the feeling doesnât go away, either.
My understanding is that it does have such a concept in that we should react similarly to different acts that are equally good/âbad to each other in terms of their consequences. My thought experiment was simply designed to remind anti-speciesists that there is no clear moral difference between eating mentally-challenged humans and eating animals. So however you react to one (whether it be with indifference, moral disgust causing you to abstain, or moral disgust that doesnât cause you to abstain) you should react in the same way to the other. If one has the thought âeating the humans is beyond the paleâ one should think âeating the animals is beyond the paleâ.
Itâs similar in flavour to Singerâs drowning child thought experimentâhe draws parallels between walking past a drowning child and not donating to help those in severe poverty. If you think to yourself âI would save the childâ, then you should probably donate more. If you think to yourself âI would walk past the child but would feel extreme guiltâ then you should probably feel that same guilt not donating. Does that make sense?
This is only the case in an âall else equalâ situation! It is very much not the case when changing oneâs reactive attitudes comes at some cost and where that cost competes with other, bigger opportunities to do good.
Same reply here: Singerâs thought experiment only works in an âall else equalâ situation. Depending on their circumstances, maybe someone should do EA direct work and not donate at all. Or maybe donate somewhere other than poverty reduction.
Iâm not sure what the cost of changing oneâs reactive attitude is. Do you mean the cost of going vegan? If so what do you see as the main costs?
Yes. Isnât it true that people who go vegan at one point in their life revert back to eating animal products? I remember this was the case based on data discussed in 2014 or so, when I last looked into it. Is it any different now? Those findings would strongly suggests that veganism isnât cost-free. Since the way you ask makes me think you believe the costs to be low, consider the possibility that youâre committing the typical mind fallacy. (Similar to how a naturally skinny person might say âI donât understand obese people; isnât it easy to eat healthy.â Well, no, most Americans are overweight and probably not thrilled about it, so if they could change it at low cost, they would. So, for some people, itâ isnât easy to stay skinny.)
Maybe we disagree on what to count as âlow costs.â If their lives depended on it, Iâd say almost everyone would be capable of going vegan. However, many people prefer prison to suicide, but that doesnât mean itâs âlow costâ to go to prison. Maybe youâre thinking the cost of going vegan is low compared to the suffering at stake for animals. And I basically agree with that â the suffering is horrible and our culinary pleasures or potential health benefits appear trivial by comparison. However, this applies only if we think about it as a direct comparison in an âall else equalâ situation. If you compare the animal suffering you can reduce via personal veganism vs. the good you can do from focusing your daily work on having the biggest positive impact, itâs often the suffering from your food consumption that pales in comparison (though it may depend on a personâs situation). People have made estimates of this (e.g., here)! Again, the previous point relates to the same disagreement we discussed in the comment thread above. If someone does important altruistic work, everything that increases their productivity or priorization by 1% is vastly more important than going vegan. You might say, âOkay, but why not go vegan in addition to those things?â Sure, that would be the ideal, in theory. But in practice, there are dozens of things that a person isnât currently doing that could improve their productivity or prioritization by 1%, and those 1%-improvements would be a bigger deal in terms of reducing suffering (or doing good in other ways). So, unless one first implements all those other things, it doesnât make sense, on consequentialist morality, to prioritize personal veganism.
I admit Iâm getting confused. I think youâve moved into arguing that going vegan has low relative value or may not even make sense for a maximising consequentialist. In my thought experiment I was trying to be agnostic on these points and simply draw a parallel between eating mentally-challenged humans and animals.
If you want to say that going vegan doesnât make consequentialist sense for âreason Xâ that is fine. Iâm just saying that you then also have to say âif I imagine myself in a world where it is mentally-challenged humans instead of animals, I would not stop eating the humans for the same reason Xâ. If you can say and mean this sentence (I expect many people can) then this thought experiment should not have an affect on your choices. To clarify I donât really judge such peopleâthey would be acting in a morally-consistent way which I think is one of the most important things in ethics.
I agree with that. Some of your earlier comments seemed like they were setting up a slightly different argument.
Someone can have the following position:
(1) They would continue to eat humans in the thought experiment world where oneâs psychological dispositions treat it as not a big deal (e.g., because itâs normalized in that world and has become a habit)
(2) They wouldnât eat humans in the thought experiment world if they retained their psychological dispositions /â reactive attitudes from the actual world â in that case, theyâd finds the scenario abhorrent
(3) When they think about (1) and (2), they donât feel compelled to modify their dispositions /â reactive attitudes toward not eating non-human animals (because of opportunity costs and because consequentialism doesnât have the concept of âappropriate reactionsâ â or, at least, the consequentialist concept for âappropriate reactionsâ is more nuanced)
I think you were arguing against (3) at one point, while I and other commenters were arguing in favor of (3).