I’m not very convinced of your second point (though I could be—curious to hear why it feels true for you). I don’t currently see why you think the bolded words instead of: “it seems harder to see the importance of future beings or think correctly about the badness of existential risk while wasting time eating non-meat”
It feels like a universally compelling argument, or at least, I don’t see where you think the argument should stop applying on a spectrum between something like “it seems hard to think correctly about x-risk without having a career in it” and “it seems hard to think correctly about the importance of all sentient beings while squashing dust mites every time you sleep”
ETA: I imagine you wrote the bolded words because they feel true to you i.e. that eating meat might cause you to value drift or have worse epistemics in certain ways such that it’s worth staying vegan. I am curious about what explicable arguments that feeling (if you have it) might be tracking (e.g. in case they cause me to stay vegan).
I don’t think your third paragraph describes what I think / feel. It’s more the other way around: I used to eat a lot of meat, and once I stopped doing that, I started seeing animals with different eyes (treating them as morally relevant, and internalizing that a lot more). The reason why I don’t eat meat now is not that I think it would cause value drift, but that it would make me deeply sad and upset – eating meat would feel similar to owning slaves that I treat poorly, or watching a gladiator fight for my own amusement. It just feels deeply morally wrong and isn’t enjoyable anymore. The fact that the consequences are only mildly negative in the grand scheme of things doesn’t change that. So I’m actually not sure if my argument supports me remaining a vegan now, but I think it’s a strong argument for me to go vegan in the first place at some point.
My guess is that a lot of people don’t actually see animals as sentient beings whose emotions and feelings matter a great deal, but more like cute things to have fun with. And anecdotally, how someone perceives animals seems to be determined by whether they eat them, not the other way around. (Insert plausible explanation – cognitive dissonance, rationalizations, etc.) I think squashing dust mites, drinking milk, eating eggs etc. seems to have a much less strong effect in comparison to eating meat, presumably because they’re less visceral, more indirect/accidental ways of hurting animals.
I think it’s plausible that being more deliberate in your diet to avoid the lowest welfare options could have a lot of the same impact on your own perceptions of animals.
That being said, eating meat again would feel wrong to me, too. I specifically work on animal welfare. How can I eat those I’m trying to help?
Similarly, I’m a bit suspicious of non-vegetarian veterinarians helping farmed animals. If working with farmed animals doesn’t turn them away from meat, do they actually have their best interests at heart? What kind of doctor eats their patients?
And maybe this logic extends to those weighing the interests of nonhuman animals or similarly minded artificial sentience in the future.
I’m still not very convinced of your original point, though—when I simulate myself becoming non-vegan, I don’t imagine this counterfactually causing me to lose my concern for animals (nor does it seem like it would harm my epistemics? Though not sure if I trust my inner sim here. It does seem like that, if anything, going non-vegan would help my epistemics, since, in my case, being vegan wastes enough time such that it is harmful for future generations to be vegan, and by continuing to be vegan I am choosing to ignore that fact).
Yeah, as I tried to explain above (perhaps it was too implicit), I think it probably matters much more whether you went vegan at some point in your life than whether you’re vegan right now.
I don’t feel confident in this; I wanted to mainly offer it as a hypothesis that could be tested further. I also mentioned the existence of crappy papers that support my perspective (you can probably find them in 5 minutes on Google Scholar). If people thought this was important, they could investigate this more.
I’ll tap out of the conversation now – don’t feel like I have time to discuss further, sorry.
I think underweighting the interests of animals and future beings with similar cognitive capacities is more likely to cause you to end up working on the wrong interventions or causes than is being roughly uniformly slightly less productive because you spend more time on veg food, and the risk of working on the wrong things could be more important than the small loss of productivity. Differences between interventions and causes can be pretty large. However, this isn’t obvious, and it could go the other way. And maybe going veg*n causes someone to underweight the far future or the less measurable relative to the near term or more measurable.
I’m not very convinced of your second point (though I could be—curious to hear why it feels true for you). I don’t currently see why you think the bolded words instead of: “it seems harder to see the importance of future beings or think correctly about the badness of existential risk while wasting time eating non-meat”
It feels like a universally compelling argument, or at least, I don’t see where you think the argument should stop applying on a spectrum between something like “it seems hard to think correctly about x-risk without having a career in it” and “it seems hard to think correctly about the importance of all sentient beings while squashing dust mites every time you sleep”
ETA: I imagine you wrote the bolded words because they feel true to you i.e. that eating meat might cause you to value drift or have worse epistemics in certain ways such that it’s worth staying vegan. I am curious about what explicable arguments that feeling (if you have it) might be tracking (e.g. in case they cause me to stay vegan).
I don’t think your third paragraph describes what I think / feel. It’s more the other way around: I used to eat a lot of meat, and once I stopped doing that, I started seeing animals with different eyes (treating them as morally relevant, and internalizing that a lot more). The reason why I don’t eat meat now is not that I think it would cause value drift, but that it would make me deeply sad and upset – eating meat would feel similar to owning slaves that I treat poorly, or watching a gladiator fight for my own amusement. It just feels deeply morally wrong and isn’t enjoyable anymore. The fact that the consequences are only mildly negative in the grand scheme of things doesn’t change that. So I’m actually not sure if my argument supports me remaining a vegan now, but I think it’s a strong argument for me to go vegan in the first place at some point.
My guess is that a lot of people don’t actually see animals as sentient beings whose emotions and feelings matter a great deal, but more like cute things to have fun with. And anecdotally, how someone perceives animals seems to be determined by whether they eat them, not the other way around. (Insert plausible explanation – cognitive dissonance, rationalizations, etc.) I think squashing dust mites, drinking milk, eating eggs etc. seems to have a much less strong effect in comparison to eating meat, presumably because they’re less visceral, more indirect/accidental ways of hurting animals.
I think it’s plausible that being more deliberate in your diet to avoid the lowest welfare options could have a lot of the same impact on your own perceptions of animals.
That being said, eating meat again would feel wrong to me, too. I specifically work on animal welfare. How can I eat those I’m trying to help?
Similarly, I’m a bit suspicious of non-vegetarian veterinarians helping farmed animals. If working with farmed animals doesn’t turn them away from meat, do they actually have their best interests at heart? What kind of doctor eats their patients?
And maybe this logic extends to those weighing the interests of nonhuman animals or similarly minded artificial sentience in the future.
That makes sense, yeah. And I could see this being costly enough such that it’s best to continue avoiding meat.
I’m still not very convinced of your original point, though—when I simulate myself becoming non-vegan, I don’t imagine this counterfactually causing me to lose my concern for animals (nor does it seem like it would harm my epistemics? Though not sure if I trust my inner sim here. It does seem like that, if anything, going non-vegan would help my epistemics, since, in my case, being vegan wastes enough time such that it is harmful for future generations to be vegan, and by continuing to be vegan I am choosing to ignore that fact).
Yeah, as I tried to explain above (perhaps it was too implicit), I think it probably matters much more whether you went vegan at some point in your life than whether you’re vegan right now.
I don’t feel confident in this; I wanted to mainly offer it as a hypothesis that could be tested further. I also mentioned the existence of crappy papers that support my perspective (you can probably find them in 5 minutes on Google Scholar). If people thought this was important, they could investigate this more.
I’ll tap out of the conversation now – don’t feel like I have time to discuss further, sorry.
I think underweighting the interests of animals and future beings with similar cognitive capacities is more likely to cause you to end up working on the wrong interventions or causes than is being roughly uniformly slightly less productive because you spend more time on veg food, and the risk of working on the wrong things could be more important than the small loss of productivity. Differences between interventions and causes can be pretty large. However, this isn’t obvious, and it could go the other way. And maybe going veg*n causes someone to underweight the far future or the less measurable relative to the near term or more measurable.