I would be wary of equivocating different forms of ‘inconvenience’. There are at least three being alluded to here:
1) Fighting the akrasia of craving animal products
2) The hassle of finding vegan premade food (else of having to prepare meals for yourself)
3) Reduced productivity gains from missing certain nutrients (else of having to carefully supplement constantly)
Of these, the first basically irrelevant in the hotel—you can remove it as a factor by just not giving people the easy option to ingest them. The second is completely irrelevant, since it’s serving or supplying 90% of the food people will be eating.
So that only leaves three, which is much talked about, but so far as I know, little studied, so this ‘inconvenience’ could even have the wrong sign: the only study on the subject I found from a very quick search showed increased productivity from veganism for health reasons; also on certain models of willpower that treat it as analogous to a muscle, it could turn out that depriving yourself (even by default, from the absence of offered foods) you improve your willpower and thus become more productive.
I’ve spoken to a number of people who eat meat/animal products for the third reason, but so far as I know they rarely seem to have reviewed any data on the question, and almost never to have actually done any controlled experiments on themselves. Honestly I suspect many of them are using the first two to justify a suspicion of the third (for eg, I know several EAs who eat meat with productivity justifications, but form whom it’s usually *processed* meat in the context of other dubious dietary choices, so they demonstrably aren’t optimising their diet for maximal productivity).
Also, if the third does turn out to be a real factor, it seems very unlikely that more than a tiny bit of meat every few days would be necessary to fix the problem for most people, and going to the shops to buy that for themselves seems unlikely to cause them any serious inconvenience.
The inconvenience I had in mind is not in your list, and comprises things in the area of, “Prefer to keep the diet I’m already accustomed to”, “Prefer omnivorous diets on taste etc. grounds to vegan ones”, and so on. I was thinking of an EA who is omnivorous and feels little/no compunction about eating meat (either because they aren’t ‘on board’ with the moral motivation for animal causes in general, or doesn’t find the arguments for veganism persuasive in particular). I think switching to a vegan diet isn’t best described as a minor inconvenience for people like these.
But to be clear, this doesn’t entail any moral obligation whatsoever on the hotel to serve meat—it’s not like they are forcing omnivorous guests to be vegan, but just not cooking them free (non-vegan) food. If a vegan offers me to stay at their house a) for free, b) offers vegan food for free too, c) welcomes me to, if I’m not a fan of vegan food, get my own food to cook at their house whenever I like—which seems basically the counterfactual scenario if I wasn’t staying with them in the first place, and d) explains all of this before I come, they’ve been supererogatory in accommodating me, and it would be absurd for me to say they’ve fallen short in not serving me free omnivorous food which they morally object to.
Yet insofar as ‘free food’ is a selling point of the hotel, ‘free vegan food’ may not be so enticing to omnivorous guests. Obviously the offer is still generous by itself, leave alone combined with free accommodation, but one could imagine it making a difference on the margin to omnivores (especially if they are cost-sensitive).
Thus there’s a trade-off in between these people and vegans who would be put off if the hotel served meat itself (even if vegan options were also provided). It’s plausible to me the best option to pick here (leave alone any other considerations) is the more ‘vegan-friendly’ policy. But this isn’t because the trade-off is in fact illusory because the ‘vegan-friendly’ policy is has minimal/minor costs to omnivores after all.
[Empirically though, this doesn’t seem to amount to all that much given (I understand) the hotel hasn’t been struggling for guests.]
I would be wary of equivocating different forms of ‘inconvenience’. There are at least three being alluded to here:
1) Fighting the akrasia of craving animal products
2) The hassle of finding vegan premade food (else of having to prepare meals for yourself)
3) Reduced productivity gains from missing certain nutrients (else of having to carefully supplement constantly)
Of these, the first basically irrelevant in the hotel—you can remove it as a factor by just not giving people the easy option to ingest them. The second is completely irrelevant, since it’s serving or supplying 90% of the food people will be eating.
So that only leaves three, which is much talked about, but so far as I know, little studied, so this ‘inconvenience’ could even have the wrong sign: the only study on the subject I found from a very quick search showed increased productivity from veganism for health reasons; also on certain models of willpower that treat it as analogous to a muscle, it could turn out that depriving yourself (even by default, from the absence of offered foods) you improve your willpower and thus become more productive.
I’ve spoken to a number of people who eat meat/animal products for the third reason, but so far as I know they rarely seem to have reviewed any data on the question, and almost never to have actually done any controlled experiments on themselves. Honestly I suspect many of them are using the first two to justify a suspicion of the third (for eg, I know several EAs who eat meat with productivity justifications, but form whom it’s usually *processed* meat in the context of other dubious dietary choices, so they demonstrably aren’t optimising their diet for maximal productivity).
Also, if the third does turn out to be a real factor, it seems very unlikely that more than a tiny bit of meat every few days would be necessary to fix the problem for most people, and going to the shops to buy that for themselves seems unlikely to cause them any serious inconvenience.
The inconvenience I had in mind is not in your list, and comprises things in the area of, “Prefer to keep the diet I’m already accustomed to”, “Prefer omnivorous diets on taste etc. grounds to vegan ones”, and so on. I was thinking of an EA who is omnivorous and feels little/no compunction about eating meat (either because they aren’t ‘on board’ with the moral motivation for animal causes in general, or doesn’t find the arguments for veganism persuasive in particular). I think switching to a vegan diet isn’t best described as a minor inconvenience for people like these.
But to be clear, this doesn’t entail any moral obligation whatsoever on the hotel to serve meat—it’s not like they are forcing omnivorous guests to be vegan, but just not cooking them free (non-vegan) food. If a vegan offers me to stay at their house a) for free, b) offers vegan food for free too, c) welcomes me to, if I’m not a fan of vegan food, get my own food to cook at their house whenever I like—which seems basically the counterfactual scenario if I wasn’t staying with them in the first place, and d) explains all of this before I come, they’ve been supererogatory in accommodating me, and it would be absurd for me to say they’ve fallen short in not serving me free omnivorous food which they morally object to.
Yet insofar as ‘free food’ is a selling point of the hotel, ‘free vegan food’ may not be so enticing to omnivorous guests. Obviously the offer is still generous by itself, leave alone combined with free accommodation, but one could imagine it making a difference on the margin to omnivores (especially if they are cost-sensitive).
Thus there’s a trade-off in between these people and vegans who would be put off if the hotel served meat itself (even if vegan options were also provided). It’s plausible to me the best option to pick here (leave alone any other considerations) is the more ‘vegan-friendly’ policy. But this isn’t because the trade-off is in fact illusory because the ‘vegan-friendly’ policy is has minimal/minor costs to omnivores after all.
[Empirically though, this doesn’t seem to amount to all that much given (I understand) the hotel hasn’t been struggling for guests.]