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.
I don’t agree with this sentiment. At least for me I really do not see any real cost associated with being vegan that would keep me from earning more or being a better person in any meaningful way.
For example, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t work more if I ate more meat, why would I? There really doesn’t seem to be a causal pathway here. Maybe if you really crave beef and you can’t help yourself thinking about this all the time… yeah, that could be distracting and reduce your performance but I am not sure that something like this occurs all that often. Never happened to me at least.
I would argue it’s actually quite the opposite. Being vegan is normally quite a healthy lifestyle that has positive effects on health all around. Don’t underestimate the impact of having to live with the cognitive dissonance of being directly responsible for the unnecessary suffering of harmless animals.
But I guess there are different preferences and maybe you see things differently. I just wanted to flag that you are not really presenting knock down arguments here. To me it seems more like a self-justificatory move to somehow “absolve” you from doing the right thing.
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 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.
I don’t agree with this sentiment. At least for me I really do not see any real cost associated with being vegan that would keep me from earning more or being a better person in any meaningful way.
For example, I am pretty sure I wouldn’t work more if I ate more meat, why would I? There really doesn’t seem to be a causal pathway here. Maybe if you really crave beef and you can’t help yourself thinking about this all the time… yeah, that could be distracting and reduce your performance but I am not sure that something like this occurs all that often. Never happened to me at least.
I would argue it’s actually quite the opposite. Being vegan is normally quite a healthy lifestyle that has positive effects on health all around. Don’t underestimate the impact of having to live with the cognitive dissonance of being directly responsible for the unnecessary suffering of harmless animals.
But I guess there are different preferences and maybe you see things differently. I just wanted to flag that you are not really presenting knock down arguments here. To me it seems more like a self-justificatory move to somehow “absolve” you from doing the right thing.
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.