I think the arguments that most animal products are bad at all in expectation to consume based on short term effects are weak, given the very uncertain effects on wild animals. Abstaining from some may mean replacing support for an active moral atrocity with a moral atrocity by omission (wild animal suffering).
The arguments are strongest (even if not very persuasive, as you note) against consuming chicken meat and eggs, farmed insects and maybe herbivorous farmed aquatic animals (other than bivalves), because of the higher density of direct suffering relative to externalities compared to other animal products.
So, if you’re looking for something relatively flexible and without having to experiment with your health (much), maybe just omit these from your diet?
Abstaining from some but not all animals seems maybe to cut against Richard’s points about the value of Schilling fences/quasi-deontological commitments against eating all animals.
On the other hard, I (and many other EAs I’m sure) develop moral identities as people who are capable of nuance and careful consequentialism on moral tradeoffs, so maybe having a very nuanced position on restrictions can help enforce this.
Personally I’ve been lactovegetarian for some years, with an exception for bivalves. I’m considering adding beef back to my diet for reasons raised above, but am unsure about both the object-level stance and also whether it’s worth investing any more thought into this (relatively nonconsequential in the grand scheme of things) decision.
Basically, I think if you tried, you could come to an opinion on the sign of the effects on wild animals, and it would likely dominate the effects on farmed animals for specific animal products.
I also think just ignoring the effects on wild animals is unprincipled and hard to justify. Diet change has a large number of effects and arguments, some positive and some negative, and you have to weigh them all together, which is very hard to do. Why pick some specific subset of the effects, e.g. the effects on cows (if we’re deciding product by product), and ignore the rest? We could also pick a subset that makes diet change look bad, and ignore the rest.
I also think just ignoring the effects on wild animals is unprincipled and hard to justify. Diet change has a large number of effects and arguments, some positive and some negative, and you have to weigh them all together, which is very hard to do. Why pick some specific subset of the effects, e.g. the effects on cows (if we’re deciding product by product), and ignore the rest? We could also pick a subset that makes diet change look bad, and ignore the rest.
A concern is that people usually become vegetarians or vegans because the case for it seems pretty straightforward and robust, similar to the case for not participating in other activities that clearly and directly harm others. But if this is no longer the primary justification, it seems like there is no special reason for singling out dietary change for this kind of in-depth scrutiny, relative to other things that people do in the course of a day (such as walking, driving, sleeping, talking, etc.). So yeah, ignoring the effects of eating on wild animals is unprincipled, but so is ignoring the effects of any of these activities on different types of sentient beings. It seems that research effort devoted to exploring these different effects should be allocated according to explicit cost-effectiveness considerations or reliable heuristics, when in fact it looks like as EAs we are “privileging the dietary hypothesis” for contingent historical reasons.
I’m sympathetic to strong longtermism which implies that that we can pretty much ignore short-run effects and instead only focus on far future effects when doing good. If strong longtermism is true, it isn’t clear how wide the class of decision situations it applies to is, but I think it’s plausible that dietary change is one of those decision situations that may be in scope. This is because there’s a very plausible link between dietary change and moral circle expansion, which has been argued to be very important from a far future perspective.
So I tend to fall in the camp of thinking that ve*ism remains pretty robust even in the face of uncertainties over impact on wild animal populations. I’m not entirely certain about this though and would welcome thoughts.
That makes sense, and I think many longtermist animal advocates roughly agree. One concern I have is about what kinds of moral ideas vegism is reinforcing. For example, vegism is normally strongly associated with environmentalism, so maybe it reinforces the idea of “leaving wild animals alone” or even trying to increase populations of wild animals via habitat restoration and rewilding.
That said, as Jacy Reese has argued, maybe most animal-like suffering in the far future will be created by humans rather than natural, in which case how people view wild-animal suffering could be less relevant than how they view human-inflicted suffering like that in factory farms. OTOH, I think there’s still a question of whether creatures that inhabit virtual worlds or ancestor simulations of the far future would be seen as “wild” or as directly harmed by humans.
I think the arguments that most animal products are bad at all in expectation to consume based on short term effects are weak, given the very uncertain effects on wild animals. Abstaining from some may mean replacing support for an active moral atrocity with a moral atrocity by omission (wild animal suffering).
The arguments are strongest (even if not very persuasive, as you note) against consuming chicken meat and eggs, farmed insects and maybe herbivorous farmed aquatic animals (other than bivalves), because of the higher density of direct suffering relative to externalities compared to other animal products.
So, if you’re looking for something relatively flexible and without having to experiment with your health (much), maybe just omit these from your diet?
Abstaining from some but not all animals seems maybe to cut against Richard’s points about the value of Schilling fences/quasi-deontological commitments against eating all animals.
On the other hard, I (and many other EAs I’m sure) develop moral identities as people who are capable of nuance and careful consequentialism on moral tradeoffs, so maybe having a very nuanced position on restrictions can help enforce this.
Personally I’ve been lactovegetarian for some years, with an exception for bivalves. I’m considering adding beef back to my diet for reasons raised above, but am unsure about both the object-level stance and also whether it’s worth investing any more thought into this (relatively nonconsequential in the grand scheme of things) decision.
I currently don’t really see a clear effect on wild animal welfare of meat consumption, could you go into that further?
To me it seems more like the kind of uncertainty to dismiss because it could go both ways.
You may have already seen this, but Brian considers some of the evidence here.
I also recommend the same article Ben West pointed out:
https://reducing-suffering.org/vegetarianism-and-wild-animals/
More recent discussion here with a few more articles:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SvbZtETGenTkZni8C/where-does-most-of-the-suffering-from-eating-meat-come-from
Basically, I think if you tried, you could come to an opinion on the sign of the effects on wild animals, and it would likely dominate the effects on farmed animals for specific animal products.
I also think just ignoring the effects on wild animals is unprincipled and hard to justify. Diet change has a large number of effects and arguments, some positive and some negative, and you have to weigh them all together, which is very hard to do. Why pick some specific subset of the effects, e.g. the effects on cows (if we’re deciding product by product), and ignore the rest? We could also pick a subset that makes diet change look bad, and ignore the rest.
A concern is that people usually become vegetarians or vegans because the case for it seems pretty straightforward and robust, similar to the case for not participating in other activities that clearly and directly harm others. But if this is no longer the primary justification, it seems like there is no special reason for singling out dietary change for this kind of in-depth scrutiny, relative to other things that people do in the course of a day (such as walking, driving, sleeping, talking, etc.). So yeah, ignoring the effects of eating on wild animals is unprincipled, but so is ignoring the effects of any of these activities on different types of sentient beings. It seems that research effort devoted to exploring these different effects should be allocated according to explicit cost-effectiveness considerations or reliable heuristics, when in fact it looks like as EAs we are “privileging the dietary hypothesis” for contingent historical reasons.
I’m sympathetic to strong longtermism which implies that that we can pretty much ignore short-run effects and instead only focus on far future effects when doing good. If strong longtermism is true, it isn’t clear how wide the class of decision situations it applies to is, but I think it’s plausible that dietary change is one of those decision situations that may be in scope. This is because there’s a very plausible link between dietary change and moral circle expansion, which has been argued to be very important from a far future perspective.
So I tend to fall in the camp of thinking that ve*ism remains pretty robust even in the face of uncertainties over impact on wild animal populations. I’m not entirely certain about this though and would welcome thoughts.
That makes sense, and I think many longtermist animal advocates roughly agree. One concern I have is about what kinds of moral ideas vegism is reinforcing. For example, vegism is normally strongly associated with environmentalism, so maybe it reinforces the idea of “leaving wild animals alone” or even trying to increase populations of wild animals via habitat restoration and rewilding.
That said, as Jacy Reese has argued, maybe most animal-like suffering in the far future will be created by humans rather than natural, in which case how people view wild-animal suffering could be less relevant than how they view human-inflicted suffering like that in factory farms. OTOH, I think there’s still a question of whether creatures that inhabit virtual worlds or ancestor simulations of the far future would be seen as “wild” or as directly harmed by humans.