I’m not 100% sure but we may be defining opportunity cost differently. I’m drawing a distinction between opportunity cost and personal cost. Opportunity cost relates to the fact that doing something may inhibit you from doing something else that is more effective. Even if going vegan didn’t have any opportunity cost (which is what I’m arguing in most cases), people may still not want to do it due to high perceived personal cost (e.g. thinking vegan food isn’t tasty). I’m not claiming there is no personal cost and that is indeed why people don’t go / stay vegan—although I do think personal costs are unfortunately overblown.
Without addressing all of your points in detail I think a useful thought experiment might be to imagine a world where we are eating humans not animals. E.g. say there are mentally-challenged humans of a comparable intelligence/capacity to suffer to non-human animals and we farm them in poor conditions and eat them causing their suffering. I’d imagine most people would judge this as morally unacceptable and go vegan on consequentialist grounds (although perhaps not and it would actually be deontological grounds?). If you would go vegan in the thought experiment but not in the real world then you’re probably speciesist to some degree which I ultimately don’t think can be defended.
I think the EA schtick is more like “we’ll think things through really carefully and tell you what the most efficient ways to do good are”. And so I think that if it’s presented as “you want to be an EA now? great! how about ve*anism?”
EA is sometimes described as doing the most good (most common definition) or I suppose is sometimes described as finding the most effective ways to do good. These can be construed as two different things. I would say under the first definition that being vegan naturally becomes part of the conversation for the reasons I have mentioned (little to no opportunity cost).
Also, we may be fundamentally disagreeing on the scale of the benefits on consequentialist grounds of going vegan as well—I think they are quite considerable. Indeed “signalling caring” as you put it can then convince others to consider veganism in which case you can get a snowball of positive effects. But that’s a whole other discussion.
P.S. I agree we can probably improve the way veganism is messaged in EA and it’s possible I am part of the problem!
I’m not 100% sure but we may be defining opportunity cost differently. I’m drawing a distinction between opportunity cost and personal cost. Opportunity cost relates to the fact that doing something may inhibit you from doing something else that is more effective. Even if going vegan didn’t have any opportunity cost (which is what I’m arguing in most cases), people may still not want to do it due to high perceived personal cost (e.g. thinking vegan food isn’t tasty). I’m not claiming there is no personal cost and that is indeed why people don’t go / stay vegan—although I do think personal costs are unfortunately overblown.
Without addressing all of your points in detail I think a useful thought experiment might be to imagine a world where we are eating humans not animals. E.g. say there are mentally-challenged humans of a comparable intelligence/capacity to suffer to non-human animals and we farm them in poor conditions and eat them causing their suffering. I’d imagine most people would judge this as morally unacceptable and go vegan on consequentialist grounds (although perhaps not and it would actually be deontological grounds?). If you would go vegan in the thought experiment but not in the real world then you’re probably speciesist to some degree which I ultimately don’t think can be defended.
EA is sometimes described as doing the most good (most common definition) or I suppose is sometimes described as finding the most effective ways to do good. These can be construed as two different things. I would say under the first definition that being vegan naturally becomes part of the conversation for the reasons I have mentioned (little to no opportunity cost).
Also, we may be fundamentally disagreeing on the scale of the benefits on consequentialist grounds of going vegan as well—I think they are quite considerable. Indeed “signalling caring” as you put it can then convince others to consider veganism in which case you can get a snowball of positive effects. But that’s a whole other discussion.
P.S. I agree we can probably improve the way veganism is messaged in EA and it’s possible I am part of the problem!