Yes, my partner keeps chickens in the backyard, so that’s the only eggs I typically eat, and we are considering buying a meat freezer and ordering shares of pasture-raised livestock instead of buying at the supermarket. I tend to think that eating meat is more or less perfectly fine as long as the animal didn’t suffer excessively during its life. I think that’s less of a morally safe position than not eating meat at all. I’d personally like to see more consideration (not necessarily endorsement, just consideration) within the EA movement of pasture-raised/low-meat diets as an alternative to vegetarianism and veganism. Right now I feel like there’s a lot of guidance available for people going vegan/vegetarian, but not much for people trying to do ethical/low-meat diets.
I found this to be a very helpful comment. In some of the recent discussions about veg*nism, I felt most people were assuming an implied binary choice between going vegan and ratifying the factory-farming system by consuming its products. We domesticated animals over 10,000 years ago, and have been eating them for thousands of years before factory farming was a thing. How to obtain animal products without factory farming is, from a historical perspective, a solved problem.[1] For people who have sufficient financial resources and some motivation, the biggest barrier may be differentiating between companies who want you to believe their products are consistent with animal welfare and those that actually are.
To be sure, non-FF animal products are expensive, and one could achieve more impact by donating the marginal additional cost to ACE-recommended charities. However, some of us have deontologists and virtue ethicists in our moral parliament. And consuming factory-farmed products likely generates epistemic bias through cognitive dissonance (e.g., by making it harder to expand the moral circle). Moreover, the extra cost of purchasing non-FF animal products should probably be considered a personal cost of one’s consumption choices, not a part of one’s effective altruism. People spend their own money on stuff that isn’t very effective in an EA sense (like pets), and that’s fine.
Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.
Yes, my partner keeps chickens in the backyard, so that’s the only eggs I typically eat, and we are considering buying a meat freezer and ordering shares of pasture-raised livestock instead of buying at the supermarket. I tend to think that eating meat is more or less perfectly fine as long as the animal didn’t suffer excessively during its life. I think that’s less of a morally safe position than not eating meat at all. I’d personally like to see more consideration (not necessarily endorsement, just consideration) within the EA movement of pasture-raised/low-meat diets as an alternative to vegetarianism and veganism. Right now I feel like there’s a lot of guidance available for people going vegan/vegetarian, but not much for people trying to do ethical/low-meat diets.
I found this to be a very helpful comment. In some of the recent discussions about veg*nism, I felt most people were assuming an implied binary choice between going vegan and ratifying the factory-farming system by consuming its products. We domesticated animals over 10,000 years ago, and have been eating them for thousands of years before factory farming was a thing. How to obtain animal products without factory farming is, from a historical perspective, a solved problem.[1] For people who have sufficient financial resources and some motivation, the biggest barrier may be differentiating between companies who want you to believe their products are consistent with animal welfare and those that actually are.
To be sure, non-FF animal products are expensive, and one could achieve more impact by donating the marginal additional cost to ACE-recommended charities. However, some of us have deontologists and virtue ethicists in our moral parliament. And consuming factory-farmed products likely generates epistemic bias through cognitive dissonance (e.g., by making it harder to expand the moral circle). Moreover, the extra cost of purchasing non-FF animal products should probably be considered a personal cost of one’s consumption choices, not a part of one’s effective altruism. People spend their own money on stuff that isn’t very effective in an EA sense (like pets), and that’s fine.
Of course, non-FF animal products are generally not financially competitive with FF ones. That is not a solved problem.
Overall I have been pleasantly surprised at how constructive this conversation has been, thanks to OP for creating space for it. Generally I find ethical discussion with EAs to be pleasant, but I had anticipated there might be an exception where veg*ism is concerned.
I would add one extra point, which is that while I do think that all of life’s activities come into the scope of ethics, I think it’s important to preserve space to make meaningful decisions without subjecting each one to conscious ethical deliberation. By analogy, sometimes we scrutinize all the available data before we make a decision; other times, we ask an expert or a friend for their opinion and defer; and still other times, we just go with our gut. I think this also applies to ethical quesitons.
There’s a perfectly good reason to elevate meat and animal product consumption to a higher level of ethical attention. But what ought our total “ethics budget” be, and what would an appropriate allocation of ethical attention be, considering all the many problems in the world? My ethics budget is relatively small, and mainly reserved for issues related to my professional work and expertise—I am interested in issues related to biomedicine because I am a professional biomedical researcher, and spend considerable time on the ethics of organ sales because that is a particularly important, tractable and neglected question to interrogate.
It seems to me that the idea that all our personal life decisions ought to be the subject of continuous moral scrutiny, or that we ought to be making “morally safe choices” in all areas of life all the time, is an overly restrictive and not very “ethically efficient” rule. So partly based on that idea, I see dietary ethics as being in the reference class of “personal life ethics,” which I downweight in my ethical calculus. That’s counterbalanced by the high level of suffering I have witnessed when I’ve watched factory farming videos, and counterbalanced again by the heavy integration into my culture and diet of meat consumption. And my current pattern of meat consumption—eating it, enjoying it, not feeling particularly guilty, but making gradual steps to phase out factory farmed meat—is the result of that balancing act.
But I would also add that I approve of people who are passionate about an ethical stance and take action to implement it in their lives, and so I applaud vegans and vegetarians, even though I do not join them. To me, it seems like there are many ways to be more virtuous in one’s live, and veganism and vegetarianism are two good examples but not mandatory for everyone.