Realizing I’m coming in late and many of my points have doubtlessly been addressed by other commenters, here are five thoughts:
This reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s 2015 criticism of using vague flow-through effects, with animal welfare cited specifically. He noted that at the extremes, it seems like the sort of warm-glow reasoning someone might use to justify donating to your local performing arts center or running the 5k Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure—both of which are perfectly fine things to do, but not traditionally seen as EA, so much as indulging in causes you may be personally passionate about on the side. I don’t agree with him that we should never consider possible flow-though effects if they seem exceptionally plausible and intuitive, and we’re explicit about just how much value we expect will come from them. But my sense is that the indirect social signaling, health, and productivity effects of dietary choices are either a wash, or not something we can accurately predict (much less generalize) with the level of rigor EA typically expects. For example, maybe reduce-atarianism and a carbon tax actually have better flow-through effects, whereas inspiring many more privileged elites to become absolutist veg*ns will actually so annoy working-class people that it (and EA as a whole) gets politicized, which actually entrenches pro-meat-eating opinions. You can hypothesize either way. Pet theories about unquantifiable spillover impact feel like something I encourage EAs to engage in personally—just so we don’t all follow the same groupthink—but not something I’d want to elevate as the established “EA thing to do.”
Bolstering EA’s moral authority by being ahead of the curve makes sense. But I think we already achieve this by funneling billions of dollars into advocacy to improve conditions on factory farms, other policy changes aiming to reduce suffering, and generally making a lot of noise about the problem. I’m very glad animal welfare is a major cause area within EA, and I donate to it. I’m even glad there are many vegetarians and vegans in EA, many of whom are more generous and disciplined than I am. But their marginal contribution to how much moral authority EA is perceived to have again seems pretty fuzzy to me.
(You seem to already get this due to your second paragraph, but for lurkers I’ll write it anyway): The community-level debate relates to concerns about moral demandingness in EA. Yes, veg*nism is a costly symbol. So is, say, donating 30% of your income or more. But we don’t typically think building a high-trust environment requires that community norm. We recognize that there’s a wide range of sacrifices we all might make every day, which might achieve an equally broad range of impacts. And what bonds us as EAs is our concern for the outputs—not for the inputs. (The one exception is arguably the 10% giving pledge—but to many people, that’s considerably easier than going veg*n, and in any case not mandatory). A high-trust environment does not demand a level of sacrifice beyond what most people are comfortable with. Above a basic threshold, “giving better” is enough.
For reasons of culture, socioeconomics, family, and even personal preferences, giving up meat is a bigger sacrifice to some people than to others. The same could be said about sacrificing additional consumption spending; or, sacrificing career aspirations that interest and fulfill you, to dive into AI or bio-risk instead. We arguably “should” do all of these things; and technically, yeah, you probably “should” go vegan. But optimizing all of it would exhaust mere mortals. So we all navigate these decisions in unique ways tailored to our personal life situations, with an eye to which of the infinite potential sacrifices get the biggest bang for the sacrificial buck. I think it’s perfectly defensible for an EA to say that the amount of good I’d achieve by going veg*n is not nearly as high as the amount of good I’d achieve for a comparable sacrifice elsewhere, and therefore it is very low on my list of things I should prioritize to become a better altruist.
The deontological argument is actually the one that most gives me pause. For example, everything I’ve said so far might also have applied to slavery in the 1800s. Thomas Jefferson might have said “well, who can tell what the flow-through effects of me freeing my slaves might be. Even if they’re positive, I might achieve the same effects by just freeing my slaves upon my death. And I’ve already bolstered my moral authority by decrying slavery as evil, and advocating for its abolition. It’s too morally demanding to expect me to forego the wealth of my massive estate while slavery remains.” And today we would be appalled by this, even if he was better than many of his contemporaries.
What weakens the deontological argument to me is our distance from the specific activity we actually object to. It is not evil to eat animals that are already dead; it is evil to torture animals on a factory farm. So in my analogy, meat-eaters are not Thomas Jefferson cracking the whip; they’re more like someone in the north buying cotton clothing made with slave labor, which many abolitionists probably did. History is much kinder to these people, from the recognition that giving up cotton would have paled in comparison to the impact they had with their pen and voice. Likewise, my deontological intuitions just incline me to lobby for stronger laws around factory farming, and to castigate the people caging chickens 100x more than the people eating them.
Altogether, my rule of thumb is this. Think about how much you’d personally pay for the purely selfish convenience and pleasure of NOT having to go veg*n. Then calculate whether this amount would save more animals if given to ACE recommended charities than it would for you to go veg*n. If it would, then instead of going veg*n, give this amount (or at minimum, an amount tailored to offset your meat consumption) to ACE charities, above and beyond whatever giving pledges you’ve already committed to. Repeat as necessary until guilt subsides.
If your guilt never subsides, then incorporate this psychic distress into your estimate of how much you actually enjoy eating meat! Maybe the amount you’re willing to pay is lower than you think, or even negative, and actually going veg*n is the right decision for you.
Realizing I’m coming in late and many of my points have doubtlessly been addressed by other commenters, here are five thoughts:
This reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s 2015 criticism of using vague flow-through effects, with animal welfare cited specifically. He noted that at the extremes, it seems like the sort of warm-glow reasoning someone might use to justify donating to your local performing arts center or running the 5k Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure—both of which are perfectly fine things to do, but not traditionally seen as EA, so much as indulging in causes you may be personally passionate about on the side. I don’t agree with him that we should never consider possible flow-though effects if they seem exceptionally plausible and intuitive, and we’re explicit about just how much value we expect will come from them. But my sense is that the indirect social signaling, health, and productivity effects of dietary choices are either a wash, or not something we can accurately predict (much less generalize) with the level of rigor EA typically expects. For example, maybe reduce-atarianism and a carbon tax actually have better flow-through effects, whereas inspiring many more privileged elites to become absolutist veg*ns will actually so annoy working-class people that it (and EA as a whole) gets politicized, which actually entrenches pro-meat-eating opinions. You can hypothesize either way. Pet theories about unquantifiable spillover impact feel like something I encourage EAs to engage in personally—just so we don’t all follow the same groupthink—but not something I’d want to elevate as the established “EA thing to do.”
Bolstering EA’s moral authority by being ahead of the curve makes sense. But I think we already achieve this by funneling billions of dollars into advocacy to improve conditions on factory farms, other policy changes aiming to reduce suffering, and generally making a lot of noise about the problem. I’m very glad animal welfare is a major cause area within EA, and I donate to it. I’m even glad there are many vegetarians and vegans in EA, many of whom are more generous and disciplined than I am. But their marginal contribution to how much moral authority EA is perceived to have again seems pretty fuzzy to me.
(You seem to already get this due to your second paragraph, but for lurkers I’ll write it anyway): The community-level debate relates to concerns about moral demandingness in EA. Yes, veg*nism is a costly symbol. So is, say, donating 30% of your income or more. But we don’t typically think building a high-trust environment requires that community norm. We recognize that there’s a wide range of sacrifices we all might make every day, which might achieve an equally broad range of impacts. And what bonds us as EAs is our concern for the outputs—not for the inputs. (The one exception is arguably the 10% giving pledge—but to many people, that’s considerably easier than going veg*n, and in any case not mandatory). A high-trust environment does not demand a level of sacrifice beyond what most people are comfortable with. Above a basic threshold, “giving better” is enough.
For reasons of culture, socioeconomics, family, and even personal preferences, giving up meat is a bigger sacrifice to some people than to others. The same could be said about sacrificing additional consumption spending; or, sacrificing career aspirations that interest and fulfill you, to dive into AI or bio-risk instead. We arguably “should” do all of these things; and technically, yeah, you probably “should” go vegan. But optimizing all of it would exhaust mere mortals. So we all navigate these decisions in unique ways tailored to our personal life situations, with an eye to which of the infinite potential sacrifices get the biggest bang for the sacrificial buck. I think it’s perfectly defensible for an EA to say that the amount of good I’d achieve by going veg*n is not nearly as high as the amount of good I’d achieve for a comparable sacrifice elsewhere, and therefore it is very low on my list of things I should prioritize to become a better altruist.
The deontological argument is actually the one that most gives me pause. For example, everything I’ve said so far might also have applied to slavery in the 1800s. Thomas Jefferson might have said “well, who can tell what the flow-through effects of me freeing my slaves might be. Even if they’re positive, I might achieve the same effects by just freeing my slaves upon my death. And I’ve already bolstered my moral authority by decrying slavery as evil, and advocating for its abolition. It’s too morally demanding to expect me to forego the wealth of my massive estate while slavery remains.” And today we would be appalled by this, even if he was better than many of his contemporaries.
What weakens the deontological argument to me is our distance from the specific activity we actually object to. It is not evil to eat animals that are already dead; it is evil to torture animals on a factory farm. So in my analogy, meat-eaters are not Thomas Jefferson cracking the whip; they’re more like someone in the north buying cotton clothing made with slave labor, which many abolitionists probably did. History is much kinder to these people, from the recognition that giving up cotton would have paled in comparison to the impact they had with their pen and voice. Likewise, my deontological intuitions just incline me to lobby for stronger laws around factory farming, and to castigate the people caging chickens 100x more than the people eating them.
Altogether, my rule of thumb is this. Think about how much you’d personally pay for the purely selfish convenience and pleasure of NOT having to go veg*n. Then calculate whether this amount would save more animals if given to ACE recommended charities than it would for you to go veg*n. If it would, then instead of going veg*n, give this amount (or at minimum, an amount tailored to offset your meat consumption) to ACE charities, above and beyond whatever giving pledges you’ve already committed to. Repeat as necessary until guilt subsides.
If your guilt never subsides, then incorporate this psychic distress into your estimate of how much you actually enjoy eating meat! Maybe the amount you’re willing to pay is lower than you think, or even negative, and actually going veg*n is the right decision for you.