I find the argument for veg*nism based on expected value fairly compelling. In a developed nation, factory farming is dominant. In a factory farm, it seems like ~all animals have net negative lives. Not eating animal products reduces demand for those animal products, leading to less animals with net negative lives being raised on factory farms.
You say that this value isn’t very big, and perhaps it isn’t. But neither is the cost? Veg*n food in my experience is as healthy, potentially cheaper, and similarly effortful to make as home-cooked non-veg*n food.
You mention moral licensing. My prior for social science research being true is pretty low so I’d tend to think this effect is small or non-existent. A 5-second google search revealed a meta-analysis of ~90 studies studying ~7000 participants, only including those with a control. They found the magnitude of the effect to be a Cohen’s d of .31 which is small. Also unpublished studies had smaller effect sizes than published ones, which makes me more skeptical.
Informal citation: A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing. Irene Blanken et al. 2015.
You also mention health/energy costs. As far as I know, the consensus is that well-planned diets whether veg*n or not are all healthy, with some (crappy? I haven’t looked into it) research that veganism is good for you. Vegan for Life by Jack Norris and Virginia Messina gives this conclusion and seems to be right. I hope someone will tell me if this opinion about health is wrong though!
Side note: a Cohen’s d of .31 is not small. My opinion is that the rules of thumb used to interpret effect sizes in psychology are messed up, because so much p-hacking in the past produced way overinflated effect sizes. Regardless, 0.3 is typically seen as a moderate effect size. A 0.3 standard deviation increase in IQ would be 4.5 points which would lead to economically meaningful differences in income.
I find the argument for veg*nism based on expected value fairly compelling. In a developed nation, factory farming is dominant. In a factory farm, it seems like ~all animals have net negative lives. Not eating animal products reduces demand for those animal products, leading to less animals with net negative lives being raised on factory farms.
You say that this value isn’t very big, and perhaps it isn’t. But neither is the cost? Veg*n food in my experience is as healthy, potentially cheaper, and similarly effortful to make as home-cooked non-veg*n food.
You mention moral licensing. My prior for social science research being true is pretty low so I’d tend to think this effect is small or non-existent. A 5-second google search revealed a meta-analysis of ~90 studies studying ~7000 participants, only including those with a control. They found the magnitude of the effect to be a Cohen’s d of .31 which is small. Also unpublished studies had smaller effect sizes than published ones, which makes me more skeptical.
Informal citation: A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing. Irene Blanken et al. 2015.
You also mention health/energy costs. As far as I know, the consensus is that well-planned diets whether veg*n or not are all healthy, with some (crappy? I haven’t looked into it) research that veganism is good for you. Vegan for Life by Jack Norris and Virginia Messina gives this conclusion and seems to be right. I hope someone will tell me if this opinion about health is wrong though!
Side note: a Cohen’s d of .31 is not small. My opinion is that the rules of thumb used to interpret effect sizes in psychology are messed up, because so much p-hacking in the past produced way overinflated effect sizes. Regardless, 0.3 is typically seen as a moderate effect size. A 0.3 standard deviation increase in IQ would be 4.5 points which would lead to economically meaningful differences in income.