TL;DR—maybe from an impact perspective your point makes sense, but I just find eating animals gross. (Also in B4 here comes a vegan)
My perspective (as someone who is vegan) who has learned about animal suffering is that the consumption of animal products, especially things like chicken breast, or other foods where you can see the bones and mechanics of it being from animal, makes the food very unappetising. Of course, the biggest impacts on animal welfare are through institutional change, wild animal suffering, and the long run future of life, but that doesn’t stop eating a piece of meat from just feeling pretty unpleasant. Given that pigs are of comparable intelligence to dogs, a good comparison might be to think of why people would feel icky about eating labrador burgers.
I don’t think it’s a fair comparison with EAs taking holiday, or even how they maximise their altruism. It’s true that those actions might affect suffering/welfare more profoundly than their dietary choices, but they’re not literally ingesting the flesh of a dead animal which I think hits the ‘yuck’ reflex pretty hard.
Also, to clarify (even if what you’ve written is a joke), you’ve put together a pretty wobbly argument with an assumption in virtually each point that I don’t think is easy to substantiate.
In terms of satire, I’m not sure that satirising the choice to not eat animal products is the funniest topic. Another example might be people who don’t want to go to animal cagefighting matches because they think it’s cruel, although maybe in some weird scenario they could run a cagefight and earn money to allocate to effective charities in a way that outweighs the suffering cagefight. But that doesn’t make someone finding the cagefighting unpleasant, or their choices around it, a topic that’s funny to satirise.
In terms of satire, I’m not sure that satirising the choice to not eat animal products is the funniest topic.
Right, it’s not supposed to be funny. I hope that reading this post makes one feel a sense of revulsion at covering up moral obligations with so many levels of rationalization. The point is that we should feel equally strongly about donations to charity.
TL;DR—maybe from an impact perspective your point makes sense, but I just find eating animals gross. (Also in B4 here comes a vegan)
My perspective (as someone who is vegan) who has learned about animal suffering is that the consumption of animal products, especially things like chicken breast, or other foods where you can see the bones and mechanics of it being from animal, makes the food very unappetising. Of course, the biggest impacts on animal welfare are through institutional change, wild animal suffering, and the long run future of life, but that doesn’t stop eating a piece of meat from just feeling pretty unpleasant. Given that pigs are of comparable intelligence to dogs, a good comparison might be to think of why people would feel icky about eating labrador burgers.
I don’t think it’s a fair comparison with EAs taking holiday, or even how they maximise their altruism. It’s true that those actions might affect suffering/welfare more profoundly than their dietary choices, but they’re not literally ingesting the flesh of a dead animal which I think hits the ‘yuck’ reflex pretty hard.
Also, to clarify (even if what you’ve written is a joke), you’ve put together a pretty wobbly argument with an assumption in virtually each point that I don’t think is easy to substantiate.
In terms of satire, I’m not sure that satirising the choice to not eat animal products is the funniest topic. Another example might be people who don’t want to go to animal cagefighting matches because they think it’s cruel, although maybe in some weird scenario they could run a cagefight and earn money to allocate to effective charities in a way that outweighs the suffering cagefight. But that doesn’t make someone finding the cagefighting unpleasant, or their choices around it, a topic that’s funny to satirise.
Right, it’s not supposed to be funny. I hope that reading this post makes one feel a sense of revulsion at covering up moral obligations with so many levels of rationalization. The point is that we should feel equally strongly about donations to charity.