FWIW, I’ve had similar thoughts: I used to think being veg*n was, in some sense, really morally important and not doing it would be really letting the side down. But, after doing it for a few years, I felt much less certain about it.*
To press though, what seems odd about the “the other things I do are so much more impactful, why should I even worry about this?” line is that it has an awkward whisper of self-importance and that it would license all sorts of other behaviours.
To draw this out with a slightly silly and not perfect analogy, imagine we hear a story about some medieval king who sometimes, but not always, kicked people and animals that got in his way. When asked by some brave lackey, “m’lord, but why do you kick them; surely there is no need?” The king replies (imagine a booming voice for best effect) “I am very important and do much good work. Given this, whether I kick or not kick is truly a rounding error, a trifle, on my efforts and I do not propose to pay attention to these consequences”.
I think that we might grant that what the king says is true—kicking things is genuinely a very small negative compared to the large positive of his other actions. However, we might still be bothered by two things. First, it’s rude for him to remind us how much more important he is than us, even if it’s true. Second, the kicking still seems unnecessary, even if it’s only small. It’s not like it helps him be more impactful with the rest of his life. So perhaps our intuitions on the meat-eating case turn on whether we think it’s a serious vs a trivial sacrifice to stop doing it.
*In fact, I’ve been experimenting with a ‘welfaretarian’ diet (where you only eat animals that have had happy lives) recently and might write something up on that at some point.
This comment captures a lot of my concerns about offsetting arguments in the context of veganism, as well as more generally. Spelled out a bit more, my worry for EAs is that we often:
1.Think we ought to donate a large amount
Actually donate some amount that is much smaller than this but much larger than most people
Discourage each other from sanctioning people who are donating much more than other people, for not donating enough
Offsetting bad acts can presumably fall into the same pool as other donations, which leads to the following issue:
let’s say that Jerry goes around kicking strangers, and also donates 20% of his income to charity, and let’s also stipulate that Jerry really thinks he ought to donate 80% of his income to charity, and that 10% of his income is enough to offset his stranger kicking. Now you might be tempted to criticize Jerry for kicking strangers, but hold on, 10 percentage points of his donations cancel out this stranger kicking, would we be criticizing Jerry for only donating 10% of his income to charity? If not, it seems we cannot criticize Jerry. But wait a minute, later we learn that Jerry actually would have donated 30% of his income to charity if he wasn’t stranger kicking, so we were wrong, his stranger kicking isn’t canceled out by his donations, it actually makes his donations worse!
Since many EAs have ideal donating thresholds much higher than they will ever reach, we don’t have a default standard to anchor their offsetting to, everything falls short by some significant amount. And since we discourage people from criticizing those who give a good deal but not enough, Jerry wouldn’t get sanctioned much more for donating 10% rather than 30%, the ethics just aren’t high enough resolution for that. The upshot is that Jerries can get away with doing almost arbitrary amounts of dickish things and not necessarily doing anything to compensate that we could hold them accountable to. Moral hazard and slippery slope arguments can be suspicious, but this is one I am fairly confident is a real problem with offsetting, at least for EAs.
Right. The problem with offsetting is that rather than (1) doing something bad (eg kicking (medieval) peasants) and then (2) offsetting it somehow (eg by donating money), the better outcome is where you do (2), ie the offset and then just don’t do the bad thing at all.
Someone might claim they won’t do (2) unless they do (1), and therefore the better outcome is that they do both (1) and (2) rather than neither (1) or (2). But this is deeply suspicious and suggests a very contorted psychology. (“Funny thing is that if I don’t kick the peasant, I just can make myself donate, actually. Soooo, are you going to line him up for me or shall I do it?”)
Amanda Askell, Tyler John, and Hayden Wilkinson have an excellent paper on offsetting but I don’t think it’s public. Here’s a link to some earlier work by Amanda that was all I could find after a quick google.
I’m excited to read it when it comes out! I’ve read Askell’s post on it before, I think it’s mostly right, though I don’t think it gets at the potential problems with offsetting for even more mild harms enough.
I suspect there are examples of things EAs do out of consideration for other humans that are just as costly, and they justify them on the grounds that this comes out of their “fuzzies” budget. e.g. Investing in serious romantic or familial relationships. I’m personally rather skeptical that I would spend any time and money saved by being non-vegan on altruistically important things, even if I wanted to. (Plus there is Nikola’s point that if you already do care a lot about animals, the emotional cost of acting in a way that financially supports factory farming could be nontrivial.)
I agree with your comment and love the story! Re your welfaretarian argument, how do you measure the happiness of the animals if you didn’t grow them yourself? Also, can a life be happy if you are ultimately killed before your time has come? I’m not judging, just curious about this concept as I haven’t heard of this.
Well, I don’t know if you can really measure the welfare of animals at all, seeing as they can’t tell us how they feel. It’s more like we infer how they are doing based on their behaviour, their conditions, what we know from their evolutionary history about what they are adapted to. Currently, the way I think about it is that it’s intensively reared animals that are the ones with bad lives. So factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and cows, as well as farmed fish are probably unhappy overall. But I could believe that sheep, deer, wild fish have happy lives.
I think a life can be happy even if cut short. It depends on how you think about population ethics and the badness of death, but I don’t want to get into the different options here. If you take a sort of standard ‘totalist’ view of these things, the world is better the more wellbeing there is in it, so adding a life that’s happy whilst it lasts (even if shorter than it could have been) is a good thing.
I’m strongly in favor of ‘welfaretarianism’! It’s been my diet* for a few years now and I’m really glad you invented a name for it. I’ve been telling people for ages that I agree you shouldn’t eat animals that suffer while farmed if it causes more of them to exist, but people don’t really internalize the logical conclusion of this, that it’s good to eat animals if it causes happy animals to exist (assuming you don’t subscribe to negative utilitarianism or the person-affecting view) or existing animals to become happier. Hypothetically, if it were more profitable to sell meat from happy chickens than from battery-cage chickens, all factory farms would switch over to raising happy chickens, though this will probably never happen due to costs and I don’t think consumers are willing to pay that much more.
*I don’t actually eat any meat from happily-farmed animals because I don’t know how you would find such a thing, but I’d be willing to eat it if it existed. In practice this resulted in me going from omnivore to lacto-vegetarian by cutting out meat products in order of most to least suffering per calorie.
how do the other things you do have great impact than going vegan (which are not mutually exclusive), given that farmed animals have lives way worse than almost all humans? i’m not even gonna humor the awful analogy of kicking things or not, which makes zero sense.
FWIW, I’ve had similar thoughts: I used to think being veg*n was, in some sense, really morally important and not doing it would be really letting the side down. But, after doing it for a few years, I felt much less certain about it.*
To press though, what seems odd about the “the other things I do are so much more impactful, why should I even worry about this?” line is that it has an awkward whisper of self-importance and that it would license all sorts of other behaviours.
To draw this out with a slightly silly and not perfect analogy, imagine we hear a story about some medieval king who sometimes, but not always, kicked people and animals that got in his way. When asked by some brave lackey, “m’lord, but why do you kick them; surely there is no need?” The king replies (imagine a booming voice for best effect) “I am very important and do much good work. Given this, whether I kick or not kick is truly a rounding error, a trifle, on my efforts and I do not propose to pay attention to these consequences”.
I think that we might grant that what the king says is true—kicking things is genuinely a very small negative compared to the large positive of his other actions. However, we might still be bothered by two things. First, it’s rude for him to remind us how much more important he is than us, even if it’s true. Second, the kicking still seems unnecessary, even if it’s only small. It’s not like it helps him be more impactful with the rest of his life. So perhaps our intuitions on the meat-eating case turn on whether we think it’s a serious vs a trivial sacrifice to stop doing it.
*In fact, I’ve been experimenting with a ‘welfaretarian’ diet (where you only eat animals that have had happy lives) recently and might write something up on that at some point.
This comment captures a lot of my concerns about offsetting arguments in the context of veganism, as well as more generally. Spelled out a bit more, my worry for EAs is that we often:
1.Think we ought to donate a large amount
Actually donate some amount that is much smaller than this but much larger than most people
Discourage each other from sanctioning people who are donating much more than other people, for not donating enough
Offsetting bad acts can presumably fall into the same pool as other donations, which leads to the following issue:
let’s say that Jerry goes around kicking strangers, and also donates 20% of his income to charity, and let’s also stipulate that Jerry really thinks he ought to donate 80% of his income to charity, and that 10% of his income is enough to offset his stranger kicking. Now you might be tempted to criticize Jerry for kicking strangers, but hold on, 10 percentage points of his donations cancel out this stranger kicking, would we be criticizing Jerry for only donating 10% of his income to charity? If not, it seems we cannot criticize Jerry. But wait a minute, later we learn that Jerry actually would have donated 30% of his income to charity if he wasn’t stranger kicking, so we were wrong, his stranger kicking isn’t canceled out by his donations, it actually makes his donations worse!
Since many EAs have ideal donating thresholds much higher than they will ever reach, we don’t have a default standard to anchor their offsetting to, everything falls short by some significant amount. And since we discourage people from criticizing those who give a good deal but not enough, Jerry wouldn’t get sanctioned much more for donating 10% rather than 30%, the ethics just aren’t high enough resolution for that. The upshot is that Jerries can get away with doing almost arbitrary amounts of dickish things and not necessarily doing anything to compensate that we could hold them accountable to. Moral hazard and slippery slope arguments can be suspicious, but this is one I am fairly confident is a real problem with offsetting, at least for EAs.
Right. The problem with offsetting is that rather than (1) doing something bad (eg kicking (medieval) peasants) and then (2) offsetting it somehow (eg by donating money), the better outcome is where you do (2), ie the offset and then just don’t do the bad thing at all.
Someone might claim they won’t do (2) unless they do (1), and therefore the better outcome is that they do both (1) and (2) rather than neither (1) or (2). But this is deeply suspicious and suggests a very contorted psychology. (“Funny thing is that if I don’t kick the peasant, I just can make myself donate, actually. Soooo, are you going to line him up for me or shall I do it?”)
Amanda Askell, Tyler John, and Hayden Wilkinson have an excellent paper on offsetting but I don’t think it’s public. Here’s a link to some earlier work by Amanda that was all I could find after a quick google.
I’m excited to read it when it comes out! I’ve read Askell’s post on it before, I think it’s mostly right, though I don’t think it gets at the potential problems with offsetting for even more mild harms enough.
… except that not kicking people also saves time, whereas entirely avoiding animal products often involves significant hassle and time cost?
I suspect there are examples of things EAs do out of consideration for other humans that are just as costly, and they justify them on the grounds that this comes out of their “fuzzies” budget. e.g. Investing in serious romantic or familial relationships. I’m personally rather skeptical that I would spend any time and money saved by being non-vegan on altruistically important things, even if I wanted to. (Plus there is Nikola’s point that if you already do care a lot about animals, the emotional cost of acting in a way that financially supports factory farming could be nontrivial.)
I agree with your comment and love the story! Re your welfaretarian argument, how do you measure the happiness of the animals if you didn’t grow them yourself? Also, can a life be happy if you are ultimately killed before your time has come? I’m not judging, just curious about this concept as I haven’t heard of this.
Well, I don’t know if you can really measure the welfare of animals at all, seeing as they can’t tell us how they feel. It’s more like we infer how they are doing based on their behaviour, their conditions, what we know from their evolutionary history about what they are adapted to. Currently, the way I think about it is that it’s intensively reared animals that are the ones with bad lives. So factory-farmed pigs, chickens, and cows, as well as farmed fish are probably unhappy overall. But I could believe that sheep, deer, wild fish have happy lives.
I think a life can be happy even if cut short. It depends on how you think about population ethics and the badness of death, but I don’t want to get into the different options here. If you take a sort of standard ‘totalist’ view of these things, the world is better the more wellbeing there is in it, so adding a life that’s happy whilst it lasts (even if shorter than it could have been) is a good thing.
I’m strongly in favor of ‘welfaretarianism’! It’s been my diet* for a few years now and I’m really glad you invented a name for it. I’ve been telling people for ages that I agree you shouldn’t eat animals that suffer while farmed if it causes more of them to exist, but people don’t really internalize the logical conclusion of this, that it’s good to eat animals if it causes happy animals to exist (assuming you don’t subscribe to negative utilitarianism or the person-affecting view) or existing animals to become happier. Hypothetically, if it were more profitable to sell meat from happy chickens than from battery-cage chickens, all factory farms would switch over to raising happy chickens, though this will probably never happen due to costs and I don’t think consumers are willing to pay that much more.
*I don’t actually eat any meat from happily-farmed animals because I don’t know how you would find such a thing, but I’d be willing to eat it if it existed. In practice this resulted in me going from omnivore to lacto-vegetarian by cutting out meat products in order of most to least suffering per calorie.
how do the other things you do have great impact than going vegan (which are not mutually exclusive), given that farmed animals have lives way worse than almost all humans? i’m not even gonna humor the awful analogy of kicking things or not, which makes zero sense.