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 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.