My Problem with Veganism and Deontology
Veganism is not the most effective way to help the world. Donating to animal welfare organizations is far more impactful. According to a calculation on an Effective Altruism (EA) forum, a donation of 5 cents to effective animal welfare organizations can offset the suffering caused by eating meat. Using this calculation, a lifetime of veganism is equivalent in expected utility (EU) to approximately $1,000 in donations. Personally, I would rather donate $1,000 than commit to a lifetime of veganism. Moreover, I believe that focusing my efforts on earning to give or pursuing a high-impact career would further increase my expected utility. Therefore, veganism does not make sense for someone aiming to maximize their EU.
The only other factor stopping me from eating meat was a deontological side-constraint. In other words, I wasn’t sure if I was comfortable with offsetting morally repugnant actions in the pursuit of EU maximization. However, I can’t find a compelling reason to maintain this discomfort. Here are my thoughts:
I would feel fine giving $1 to an organization that causes harm if I could simultaneously donate $10 to a cause that does good, resulting in a net positive EU (+$9 EU). I think most people would feel the same.
Eating meat seems indirect enough that offsetting feels acceptable. When you purchase meat, the harm unfolds as follows: A farm reviews the previous year’s demand and decides to expand operations to supply another 1,000 chickens. Of course, this decision typically occurs for every 1,000th chicken sold. This level of indirectness feels similar to the harm caused by emitting CO₂ during a commute. For instance, my emissions might exacerbate a flood by 0.1% twenty years later, leading to one extra death for every 1,000 commutes on average.
Despite these parallels, the average EA seems much more comfortable offsetting emissions than offsetting meat consumption. Why? I suspect that even those with deontological side-constraints are more willing to tolerate harm when it feels sufficiently indirect. Otherwise, such people would have to commit all their resources to living a zero-emission, vegan, and entirely self-sustaining life. Failure to achieve this would render their very existence morally reprehensible. My argument is that most EAs are okay with offsetting harm—except when it comes to eating meat.
Furthermore, if an EA has a deontological side-constraint, does it compel them to prescribe veganism for others?
If the EA says “yes,” then why does deontology justify preventing others from maximizing EU?
If the EA says “no,” why is there an asymmetry between what they do themselves and what they want others to do?
My Problem with Deontology and Deontological Side-Constraints
When the only thing stopping you from making the world a better place via EU maximization is a personal unwillingness to commit harm, are you just being selfish? Are you prioritizing keeping your own hands clean over reducing overall suffering? Yes, causing harm may feel horrible, but do your feelings justify the suffering you could have alleviated? EA involves significant personal sacrifice, and I currently feel that sacrificing a “clean conscience” in the pursuit of EU maximization should be considered praiseworthy. I feel similarly about risk aversion.
More Questions About Deontology
Deontology posits that sacrificing one person to save two is wrong. Likewise, someone else deciding to sacrifice one to save two is also wrong. However, deontologists do not seem to apply this reasoning consistently across all actions. This is contradictory because all actions have butterfly effects, and in their aftermath, a completely different set of people may end up harmed. For instance, how can a deontologist justify something as simple as scrolling on TikTok? The algorithm adjusts based on their behavior, altering the feed of hundreds of other users. This might result in a drunk driver seeing a different video, which distracts them and causes them to hit a different car than they otherwise would have.
If every action leads to unpredictable but inevitable harm, shouldn’t all actions be classified as morally reprehensible under deontological reasoning?
Opinions and pushback are appreciated.
My reasons for being vegan have little to do with the direct negative effects of factory farming. They are in roughly descending order of importance.
A constant reminder to myself that non-human animals matter. My current day-to-day activities give nearly no reason to think about the fact that non-human animals have moral worth. This is my 2-5 times per day reminder of this fact.
Reduction of cognitive dissonance. It took about a year of being vegan to begin to appreciate, viscerally, that animals had moral worth. It’s hard to quantify this but it is tough to think that animals have moral worth when you eat them a few times a day. This has flow-through effects on donations, cause prioritization, etc.
The effect it has on others. I’m not a pushy vegan at all. I hardly tell people but every now and then people notice and ask questions about it.
Solidarity with non-EAA animal welfare people. For better or worse, outside of EA, this seems to be a ticket to entry to be considered taking the issue seriously. I want to be able to convince them to donate to THL over a pet shelter and to SWP over dog rescue charities and the the EA AWF over Pets for Vets. They are more likely to listen to me when they see me as one of them who just happens to be doing the math.
Reducing the daily suffering that I cause. It’s still something even though it pales in comparison to my yearly donations but it is me living in accordance with my values and is causing less suffering than I would otherwise.
I don’t know man, virtue signaling to non-vegans and vegans that you care about animals can be done simply by telling people you donate 10% of your money to animal welfare. It doesn’t take much more than that. Utilitarianism can be explained.
As for lowering cognitive dissonance, this is an extremely person to person thing. I would never prescribe veganism to an EA with this reasoning. And this this was a common reason, why haven’t I also been told to have a pet/animal companion to increase how much moral worth I give animals?
And reducing daily suffering that you cause can also be done better with an extra 10 cents or so. Wouldn’t this be more in accordance with your values? Surely 10 cents is also cheaper than veganism.
Sorry if I sound attacking.
I listed in descending order of importance. I might be confused for one of those “hyper rationalist” types in many instances. I think rationalist undervalue the cognitive dissonance. In my experience, a lot of rationalists just don’t value non human animals. Even rationalists behave in a much more “vibes” based way than they’d have you believe. It really is hard to hold in your head both “it’s okay to eat animals” and “we can avert tremendous amounts of suffering to hundreds of animals per dollar and have a moral compulsion to do so”.
I also wouldn’t call what I do virtue signaling. I never forthright tell people and I live in a very conservative part of the world.
It looks to me like you’re not including some other pretty important ways veganism can increase expected utility beyond the direct impact of reducing the suffering caused by your diet. For example, it’s a clear signal to other people that you think animals matter morally and are willing to make sacrifices for their benefit. And it helps build a norm of not harming animals for human benefit, reducing the risk of locking in speciesist values. I think there are many EAs who wouldn’t make the sacrifice to be vegan in a hypothetical world where no one would ever know their dietary choices, but who think it’s a very important thing to do in the world we do live in.
I believe that honesty and acting according to your values is more important. If your value is EU maximization, then your actions and opinion should reflect that. I didn’t appreciate that I learned veganism through EA only to discover that it may be an order of magnitude less effective than animal welfare donations. I think EAs should also not forget they need to signal to each other. I think many EAs have been given the message “go vegan to reduce suffering,” but not “animal welfare is the most effective way to help animals.”
Sorry! I’ve edited my comment to make it clearer that I’m trying to say that suffering caused by eating meat is not the only factor you should weigh in estimating expected utility.
(For what it’s worth I do still think it’s likely that, taking these other benefits into account and assuming you think society is seriously undervaluing the moral worth of animals, veganism still doesn’t make sense as a matter of maximizing utility.)
I am very happy to see this post.
As a practical matter, agents can only burden themselves so much in so many ways. Even if an agent is committed to impartial utility maximization, increasing his/her burden will decrease productivity and/or risk value drift via burnout.
If the burden of restricting one’s diet to veganism burdens an agent more than the utility derived from this restriction (which can be calculated and paid for in offsets), it does not make sense for an agent to do so. Of course, it may be difficult to calculate the value of this dietary restriction, which may include avoidance of negative utility, by contributing to demand for animal products and thus harming animals, but also the preemption of positive utility from contributing to demand for vegan products and sending a broader social signal as to the value of animal rights and the normality of veganism. Thus, the value of being vegan vs. omnivore has quite a bit to it to calculate the total value attributable to it.
However, if you are not a significant public figure and you would be significantly burdened by switching to veganism (due to your cultural or family situation, health issues, or you just really enjoy consuming animal products), it may very well make more sense to spend your altruistic sacrifice points on increasing utility in other ways, such as by donating to charities that effectively address farmed animal welfare.
I basically agree with the core case for “animal welfare offsetting”, and discuss some related ideas in Confessions of a Cheeseburger Ethicist. The main points of resistance I’d flag are just:
For some people, there may not be any “tradeoff” between going vegan and donating. If you can easily do both, all the better! So it’s worth being clear that the argument isn’t really against veganism so much as against investing too much moral effort into becoming vegan (if it would require significant willpower).
As Jeff notes, there may be better second-order effects from going vegan. Presumably a sufficiently large extra donation could balance those out, but it’s very hard to guess what would be sufficient. (I do think there’s also value to omnivores like us being public about valuing animal welfare and donating accordingly. That might help reach some different audiences, for example. But I still think it’s worth esteeming veganism as a laudatory practice, even if it shouldn’t be everyone’s top priority.)
One could classify a whole lot of harms as “indirect enough” under this logic. I’m hesitant to trot out examples involving serious mistreatment of human beings on the Forum. However, I submit that consideration of some examples along those lines would suggest that while “indirect enough” (as described in your post) may be a necessary precondition to offsetting being morally acceptable, it is not a sufficient precondition.
The CO2 hypothetical strikes me as meaningfully different. There’s a sustainable amount of CO2 emission, and certain forms of offsetting can ensure that your net contribution to CO2 emission does not exceed your fair share of the sustainable amount. In that scenario, you’re not violating the side constraint of taking more than your net fair share from the commons at all.
I continue to think many (but not all) offset calculations are too low in ways that may be problematic from a deontological perspective. For instance, some end up shifting much of the cost of one’s own morally problematic conduct onto third parties, which doesn’t seem to fit within a deontological framework. And standards for crediting impact need to be stricter here because multiple counting is a much more meaningful problem than when an altruistic donor is deciding where to donate. But that is somewhat of a different issue.
The other problem with the “indirect enough” argument is that the donations are even more indirect
Sure, the meat people eat is usually killed long before it’s ordered and eating a few dozen chickens per year doesn’t individually shift an industry. But likewise, a $1000 donation doesn’t meaningfully affect an advocacy charity’s ability to win a court case.
Both only work in aggregate, and on a causal basis the link between meat demand and factory farming is much more robustly-established than advocacy charity income and relative absence of factory farms[1]
This is a good point too. If you’re using donations to prioritise in a counterfactual scenario, what part of the outcome is actually “your impact” is irrelevant. If you’re using them to buy indulgences, that’s less obviously the case.
on a money basis it’s less certain, but I still don’t think vegan diets are dramatically more expensive than meat ones, and the DALY impact of eating half a chicken doesn’t seem to be very different from favourable estimates of DALY impact of a dollar donation to Legal Impact for Chickens…
You seem to be generally conflating EA and utilitarianism. If nothing else, there are plenty of deontologist EAs. (Especially if we’re being accurate with terminology!)
Deontology can’t help you differentiate between charities or impactful careers. Only utilitarianism can, right?
Deontology doesn’t require you not to have any utilitarian calculations, just that the rules to follow are not justified solely on the basis of outcomes. A deontologist can believe they have a moral obligation to give 10% of their income to the most effective charity as judged by their expected outcomes, for example, making them in some real sense a strictly EA deontologist.
As an omnivore who wants to eat lots of protein for fitness, I would love to agree with this and just keep on piling up chicken breasts on my plate. However, I think there are some factors ignored here. Most of them have already been addressed, but I’d like to add another that I did not find so far:
Not eating meat has not only an effect in terms of less demand for meat, it also increases demand for alternatives. This should, in my opinion, not be underestimated, as it also makes the diet change much easier.
For example: In Germany, we have a company called Rügenwalder Mühle. The origins of this company go back to a butcher shop back in 1834 and consequently, they always sold meat-based products. However, in 2014 they introduced vegetarian and vegan alternatives that were so great in terms of taste, quality and nutritional value that the demand was incredibly high. By now, these products bring in more revenue for them than the meat products. Obviously, this company will now focus more and more on the alternatives and they keep expanding their catalogue, often times with very high protein. This makes it much easier for a person like me to consider alternatives, and leads people to consume less meat even if they don’t have any moral motivation to go vegan.
I doubt that any realistic amount of donations can top this. Sure, e.g. The Good Food Institute is basically trying to go into this direction, but at the end the demand needs to be there for it to work out long-term. Similar to voting in democracies, I think the “small effect” of our decisions can have quite an impact here that is hard to replace with donations.
I think offsetting your emissions and offsetting your meat consumption are treated differently by EAs because they really are different.
I liked the two examples presented by William MacAskill in ‘Doing good better’:
Offsetting your contribution to climate change by donating to CoolEarth, so that all the CO2 you produce gets offset before it gets to harm anyone—the ‘undoing harm’ kind
Donating to an org that advocates for not cheating on your spouse to offset your cheating on your spouse—the ‘apology’ kind
In the second case the damage is already done; by offsetting, you just prevent further harm. Eating meat while donating to animal welfare organizations is more like the second example. You harm some animals and then pay for some other animals to be saved. You can’t undo the harm done to the animals harmed.
For the issues you raised in the last section, you may find this paper by Mogensen & Macaskill valuable. From the abstract: “Given plausible assumptions about the long-run impact of our everyday actions, we show that standard non-consequentialist constraints on doing harm entail that we should try to do as little as possible in our lives.”
As a vegan I agree with Marcus and Jeff’s takes but also think at least carnitarianism (not eating fish) is justifiable on pure utilitarian grounds. The 5 cent offset estimate is miles off (by a factor of 50-100) for fish and shrimp here, and this is how your argument falls.
I made a rough model that suggests a 100g cooked serving for farmed carp is ~1.1 years in a factory farm, and that of farmed shrimp is ~6 years in a factory farm. I modelled salmon and it came out much lower than this, but I expect this to grow when I factor in the fact salmon are carnivorous and farmed fish are used in salmon fish feed.
This is a lot of time, and it’s more expensive to pay for offsets that cover a longer time period. We have two main EA-aligned options for aquaculture ‘offsets’, one is the Fish Welfare Initiative, which (iirc) improves the life of a single fish across its lifetime for a marginal dollar, and the other is the Shrimp Welfare Project, which improves the death (a process lasting 3-5 minutes) of 1000 shrimp per year for a marginal dollar (we don’t know how good their corporate campaigns will be yet).
I’m really not sure how good it is for a carp to have a lower stocking density and higher water quality, which is FWI’s intervention in India, and essentially the best case for FWI’s effectiveness. If we assume it’s a 30% reduction in lifetime pain we can offset a fish meal for roughly $3.33.
I don’t think it’s good to prevent 1 year of shrimp suffocation and then go off and cause shrimp to spend 100 years in farmed conditions (which are really bad, to be clear). Biting the bullet on that and assuming a stunner lasts 20 years and no discount rate, to offset a single shrimp meal you’d have to pay $4.6 (nearly 100 times more than the estimate you used).
Maybe you could offset using a different species (chicken, through corporate commitments). Vasco Grilo thinks a marginal dollar gets you 2 years of chicken life in factory farms averted. Naively I’d think that chicken lives are better than shrimp lives, but shrimp matter slightly less morally. This time you probably have to pay $3 to offset a shrimp meal using the easiest species to influence.
Additionally, the lead time on offsets is long (I would think at least five years from a donation to a corporate commitment being implemented). It’s not good to have an offset that realises most of its value 20 years from now when, by then, there is a much higher chance of lab grown meat being cheaper or animal welfare regulations being better.
I think that you should at least be carnitarian because this is incredibly easy and based on my modelling (second sheet) it’s the vast majority (90-95%) of the (morally adjusted) time saved in factory farms associated with vegetarianism. I doubt that any person gets $4 of utility from eating a different kind of meat, and this just adds up over time.
Related thread here.
Maybe I am naive but what is the cost that’s associated with not eating meat? Not having the taste of it? What motivates you to donate money to reduce animal suffering if you believe that your taste is more valuable than the life of the animal in the first place? Or are you at a point where you believe that animals matter enough to warrant some small amounts of donations but not to deprive you of their taste?
I mean, of course it’s good to donate but I don’t see why this means that you should continue the practice that you want to offset if you can help it or am I missing something?
Similarly, if I offset pollution, I do not turn around and pollute more because that would defeat the purpose?!
I am not maximally EA and I assume you aren’t either. (In the sense that we aren’t spending every living second trying to generate impact). We both have some level of commitment towards altruism that we are willing to put in. I believe that spending effort to be vegan has a cost, if I spent that time making more money, I could do more for the world. Therefore yes, my taste is more important the life of the an animal.
I can ask you a similar question: Do you believe spending time on your hobby yesterday is more valuable than the life of the animals that you could have saved?
As for pollution, I can say that my commute is more important that the impact of my emissions because I can outweigh my suffering caused through donations.
We are imperfect and we need to prioritize the most important actions to reduce suffering. We don’t have infinite energy. A lifetime of veganism is difficult. Making or saving $1000 is comparatively not.
I think offsetting emissions and offsetting meat consumption are comparable under utilitarianism, but much less comparable under most deontological moral theories, if you think animals have rights. For instance, if you killed someone and donated $5,000 to the Malaria Consortium, that seems worse – from a deontological perspective – than if you just did nothing at all, because the life you kill and the life you save are different people, and many deontological theories are built on the “separateness of persons.” In contrast, if you offset your CO2 emissions, you’re offsetting your effect on warming, so you don’t kill anyone to begin with (because it’s not like your CO2 emissions cause warming that hurts agent A, and then your offset reduces temperatures to benefit agent B). It might be similarly problematic to offset your contribution to air pollution, though, because the effects of air pollution happen near the place where the pollution actually happened.
Note, however, that I think the question of whether there can be deontic side-constraints regarding our treatment of animals is unclear even conditioning on deontology. Many deontologist philosophers – like Huemer – are uncertain whether animals have “rights” (as a patient-centered deontologist would put it), even though they think (1) humans have rights and (2) animals are still deserving of moral consideration. Deontologists sometimes resort to something like “deontology for people, consequentialism for animals” (although some other deontologists, like Nozick, thought that this was insufficient for animals).
It looks like this posted twice? It seems to be a duplicate of My Problem with Veganism and Deontology
I put this one back up and took the other one down. Thx
Executive summary: The post argues against veganism and deontological ethics, claiming that offsetting harm through effective donations is more impactful than avoiding meat consumption, and that deontological side-constraints are inconsistently applied and may prevent greater good through utility maximization.
Key points:
According to EA calculations, a $1,000 donation to animal welfare organizations can offset a lifetime of meat consumption, making veganism less efficient than earning-to-give strategies.
The indirect nature of harm from meat consumption is comparable to carbon emissions, yet EAs are more willing to offset the latter—suggesting inconsistent application of moral principles.
Deontological side-constraints (refusing to cause direct harm) may be selfish if they prevent greater positive impact through utility maximization.
The post identifies a key contradiction: deontologists inconsistently apply their principles to actions with butterfly effects, which all ultimately cause some form of harm.
The author questions whether personal moral purity (avoiding direct harm) should be sacrificed for greater overall positive impact.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.