On a less satirical note, I think one strong argument in favor of eating meat is that beef cattle (esp. grass-fed) might have net positive lives. If this is true, then the utilitarian line is to 1) eat more beef to increase demand, 2) continue advocating for welfare reforms that will make cows’ lives even more positive.
Beef cattle are different than e.g. factory farmed chicken in that they live a long time (around 3 years on average vs 6-7 weeks for broilers), and spend much of their lives grazing on stockers where they might have natural-ish lives.
Another argument in favor of eating beef is that it tends to lead to deforestation, which decreases total wild animal habitat, which one might think are worse than beef farms.
I haven’t looked into this myself in any detail, but I just wanted to note that others have concluded that factory farmed cows have net negative lives, e.g. see this post by charity entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, here are excerpts from a couple of relevant posts, written by Brian Tomasik:
1) “Rainforest-beef production probably reduces wild-insect suffering. In fact, purchasing one kg of Brazilian beef prevents 2.6 * 105 insect-years of suffering as a median estimate and 5.9 * 106 insect-years in expectation. The sign of this conclusion could flip around if you substantially change certain input parameters—particularly if you think death by burning is many times more painful than predation and other non-burning deaths.”
2) “If someone insists on eating meat, I would recommend eating rainforest-raised or grass-fed beef. Rainforest-grown beef plausibly reduces net animal populations because rainforests have such high productivity. Grass-fed beef plausibly also reduces net animal populations, because cattle can eat lots of grass that would otherwise feed smaller animals, and given that less of the feed for these cattle is farmed grain than in the case of non-grass-fed cattle, the uncertain net impacts of crop cultivation loom relatively less large over the calculation.”
The Charity Entrepreneurship report doesn’t seem to mention that beef cattle spend around half their lives on pasture. They are also including some dairy cattle considerations that don’t apply to beef cattle, e.g. tie stalls. I think this might be skewing their report to a more negative estimate than appropriate.
Basically, yes their lives seem positive, but between small increases in demand for other kinds of meat (cross price elasticity) and long-run economic costs of climate change I consider it bad.
It seems to me that the fact that grass-fed beef cattle might not have net positive lives is a strong argument in favor of not eating grass-fed beef. My values are roughly utilitarian but I have a fair amount of moral uncertainty and it seems to me that avoiding eating meat seems like the cautious thing to do given this uncertainty.
I think that only makes sense if you’re negative leaning, which I’m not. If you think that adding pleasurable lives is good, then you’d be taking a risk of *not* creating the net-positive cattle lives when you decided to eat tofu over beef.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily arguing that we should eat beef (I’m vegan), I just thought it would be useful to describe the arguments that I thought this post was going to make before I read it :).
Donating is much more effective than the increase in demand though, especially when you consider the elasticity factor. So in that case you should just buy whatever food is cheaper and donate the excess, tofu is about 3x cheaper ($2 per pound) vs grass-fed beef ($6 per pound). I guess if you truly hate tofu you could have an excuse but there’s always soy sauce to make it tastier.
I’m very skeptical of negative utilitarianism. There are other ways it makes sense if other non-utilitarian considerations matter, as I was saying above.
To try to point you in the direction I was thinking, I’ll quote Michael Huemer below and clarify that I lean toward Huemer’s view that the appropriate thing to do is “draw a line somewhere in the middle” rather than take the extreme view of strict consequentialism:
““How large must the benefits be to justify a rights violation?” (For instance, for what number n is it permissible to kill one innocent person to save n innocent lives?) One extreme answer is “Rights violations are never justified,” but for various reasons, I think this answer [is] indefensible. Another extreme answer is consequentialism, “Rights violations are justified whenever the benefits exceed the harms” – which is really equivalent to saying there are no such things as rights. This is not indefensible, but it is very counter-intuitive. So we’re left with a seemingly arbitrary line somewhere in the middle.”
When drawing the line somewhere in the middle murdering one person to save two may not be permissible (even though under utilitarianismit is), but murdering one to save 1000 may be, say.
Similarly, under one of these “line somewhere in the middle” views killing a sentient cattle for beef may be permissible if one could be certain that the cattle definitely had a net positive life, however killing the cattle may be impermissible given a certain amount of doubt (say 10%) about whether the cattle’s life is net positive (even if one still thinks the cattle’s life is net positive in expectation).
On a less satirical note, I think one strong argument in favor of eating meat is that beef cattle (esp. grass-fed) might have net positive lives. If this is true, then the utilitarian line is to 1) eat more beef to increase demand, 2) continue advocating for welfare reforms that will make cows’ lives even more positive.
Beef cattle are different than e.g. factory farmed chicken in that they live a long time (around 3 years on average vs 6-7 weeks for broilers), and spend much of their lives grazing on stockers where they might have natural-ish lives.
Another argument in favor of eating beef is that it tends to lead to deforestation, which decreases total wild animal habitat, which one might think are worse than beef farms.
I haven’t looked into this myself in any detail, but I just wanted to note that others have concluded that factory farmed cows have net negative lives, e.g. see this post by charity entrepreneurship.
On the other hand, here are excerpts from a couple of relevant posts, written by Brian Tomasik:
1) “Rainforest-beef production probably reduces wild-insect suffering. In fact, purchasing one kg of Brazilian beef prevents 2.6 * 105 insect-years of suffering as a median estimate and 5.9 * 106 insect-years in expectation. The sign of this conclusion could flip around if you substantially change certain input parameters—particularly if you think death by burning is many times more painful than predation and other non-burning deaths.”
2) “If someone insists on eating meat, I would recommend eating rainforest-raised or grass-fed beef. Rainforest-grown beef plausibly reduces net animal populations because rainforests have such high productivity. Grass-fed beef plausibly also reduces net animal populations, because cattle can eat lots of grass that would otherwise feed smaller animals, and given that less of the feed for these cattle is farmed grain than in the case of non-grass-fed cattle, the uncertain net impacts of crop cultivation loom relatively less large over the calculation.”
The Charity Entrepreneurship report doesn’t seem to mention that beef cattle spend around half their lives on pasture. They are also including some dairy cattle considerations that don’t apply to beef cattle, e.g. tie stalls. I think this might be skewing their report to a more negative estimate than appropriate.
See https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bhGReNjGCoJjRCXo9/an-integrated-model-to-evaluate-the-impact-of-animal and the sources/welfare estimates therein.
Basically, yes their lives seem positive, but between small increases in demand for other kinds of meat (cross price elasticity) and long-run economic costs of climate change I consider it bad.
It seems to me that the fact that grass-fed beef cattle might not have net positive lives is a strong argument in favor of not eating grass-fed beef. My values are roughly utilitarian but I have a fair amount of moral uncertainty and it seems to me that avoiding eating meat seems like the cautious thing to do given this uncertainty.
I think that only makes sense if you’re negative leaning, which I’m not. If you think that adding pleasurable lives is good, then you’d be taking a risk of *not* creating the net-positive cattle lives when you decided to eat tofu over beef.
To be clear, I’m not necessarily arguing that we should eat beef (I’m vegan), I just thought it would be useful to describe the arguments that I thought this post was going to make before I read it :).
Donating is much more effective than the increase in demand though, especially when you consider the elasticity factor. So in that case you should just buy whatever food is cheaper and donate the excess, tofu is about 3x cheaper ($2 per pound) vs grass-fed beef ($6 per pound). I guess if you truly hate tofu you could have an excuse but there’s always soy sauce to make it tastier.
I’m very skeptical of negative utilitarianism. There are other ways it makes sense if other non-utilitarian considerations matter, as I was saying above.
To try to point you in the direction I was thinking, I’ll quote Michael Huemer below and clarify that I lean toward Huemer’s view that the appropriate thing to do is “draw a line somewhere in the middle” rather than take the extreme view of strict consequentialism:
““How large must the benefits be to justify a rights violation?” (For instance, for what number n is it permissible to kill one innocent person to save n innocent lives?) One extreme answer is “Rights violations are never justified,” but for various reasons, I think this answer [is] indefensible. Another extreme answer is consequentialism, “Rights violations are justified whenever the benefits exceed the harms” – which is really equivalent to saying there are no such things as rights. This is not indefensible, but it is very counter-intuitive. So we’re left with a seemingly arbitrary line somewhere in the middle.”
When drawing the line somewhere in the middle murdering one person to save two may not be permissible (even though under utilitarianismit is), but murdering one to save 1000 may be, say.
Similarly, under one of these “line somewhere in the middle” views killing a sentient cattle for beef may be permissible if one could be certain that the cattle definitely had a net positive life, however killing the cattle may be impermissible given a certain amount of doubt (say 10%) about whether the cattle’s life is net positive (even if one still thinks the cattle’s life is net positive in expectation).