I’ve thought a bit about this for personal reasons, and I found Scott Alexander’s take on it to be enlightening.
I see a tension between the following two arguments that I find plausible:
Some people run into health issues due to a vegan diet despite correct supplementation. In most cases it’s probably because of incorrect or absent supplementation, but probably not in all. This could mean that a highly productive EA doing highly important work may cease to be as productive with a small probability. Since they’ve probably been doing extremely valuable work, this decrease in output may be worse than the suffering they would’ve inflicted if they had [eaten some beef and had some milk](https://impartial-priorities.org/direct-suffering-caused-by-various-animal-foods.html). So they should at least eat a bit of beef and drink a bit of milk to reduce that risk. (These foods may increase other risks – but let’s assume for the moment that the person can make that tradeoff correctly for themselves.)
There is currently in our society a strong moral norm against stealing. We want to live in a society that has a strong norm against stealing. So whenever we steal – be it to donate the money to a place where it has much greater marginal utility than with its owner – we erode, in expectation, the norm against stealing a bit. People have to invest more into locks, safes, guards, and fences. People can’t just offer couchsurfing anymore. This increase in anomie (roughly, lack of trust and cohesion) may be small in expectation but has a vast expected societal effect. Hence we should be very careful about eroding valuable societal norms, and, conversely, we should also take care to foster new valuable societal norms or at least not stand in the way of them emerging.
I see a bit of a Laffer curve here (like an upside-down U) where upholding societal rules that are completely unheard of has little effect, and violating societal rules that are extremely well established has little effect again (except that you go to prison). The middle section is much more interesting, and this is where I generally advise to tread softly. (But I’m also against stealing.)
Because the way I resolve this tension for me is to assess whether in my immediate environment – the people who are most likely to be directly influenced by me – a norm is potentially about to emerge. If that is the case, and I approve of the norm, I try to always uphold that norm to at least an above average level.
Well, and then there are a few more random caveats:
As the norm not to harm other animals for food becomes stronger, it’ll be less socially awkward for people (outside vegan circles) to eat vegan food. Social effects were (last time I checked) still the second most common reason for vegan recidivism.
As the norm not to harm other animals for food becomes stronger, more effort will be put into providing properly fortified food to make supplementation automatic.
Eroding a budding social norm because it comes at a cost to one’s own goals seems like the sort of freeriding that I think the EA community needs to be very careful about. In some cases the conflict is only due to lacking idealization of preferences or only between instrumental rather than terminal goals or the others would defect against us in any case, but we don’t know any of this to be the case here. The first comes down to unanswered questions of population ethics, the second to the exact tradeoffs between animal suffering and health risks for a particular person, and the third to how likely animal rights activists are to badmouth AI safety, priorities research, etc. – probably rarely.
Being vegan among EAs, young, educated people, and other disproportionately antispeciesist groups may be more important than being vegan in a community of hunters.
A possible, unusual conclusion to draw from this is to be “private carnivor”: You only eat vegan food in public, and when people ask you whether you’re vegan, you tell them that you think eating meat is morally bad, a bad norm, and shameful, and so you only do it in private and as rarely as possible. No lies or pretense.
There’s also the option of moral offsetting, which I find very appealing (despite these criticisms – I think I somewhat disagree with my five-year-old comment there now), but it doesn’t seem to quite address the core issue here.
Another argument you mentioned to me at an EAGx was something along the lines that it’ll be harder to attract top talent in field X (say, AI safety) if they not only have to subscribe X being super important but have to subscribe to X being super important and be vegan. Friend of mine solve that by keeping those things separate. Yes, the catering may be vegan, but otherwise nothing indicates that there’s any need for them to be vegan themselves. (That conversation can happen, if at all, in a personal context separate of any ties to field X.)
I’ve thought a bit about this for personal reasons, and I found Scott Alexander’s take on it to be enlightening.
I see a tension between the following two arguments that I find plausible:
Some people run into health issues due to a vegan diet despite correct supplementation. In most cases it’s probably because of incorrect or absent supplementation, but probably not in all. This could mean that a highly productive EA doing highly important work may cease to be as productive with a small probability. Since they’ve probably been doing extremely valuable work, this decrease in output may be worse than the suffering they would’ve inflicted if they had [eaten some beef and had some milk](https://impartial-priorities.org/direct-suffering-caused-by-various-animal-foods.html). So they should at least eat a bit of beef and drink a bit of milk to reduce that risk. (These foods may increase other risks – but let’s assume for the moment that the person can make that tradeoff correctly for themselves.)
There is currently in our society a strong moral norm against stealing. We want to live in a society that has a strong norm against stealing. So whenever we steal – be it to donate the money to a place where it has much greater marginal utility than with its owner – we erode, in expectation, the norm against stealing a bit. People have to invest more into locks, safes, guards, and fences. People can’t just offer couchsurfing anymore. This increase in anomie (roughly, lack of trust and cohesion) may be small in expectation but has a vast expected societal effect. Hence we should be very careful about eroding valuable societal norms, and, conversely, we should also take care to foster new valuable societal norms or at least not stand in the way of them emerging.
I see a bit of a Laffer curve here (like an upside-down U) where upholding societal rules that are completely unheard of has little effect, and violating societal rules that are extremely well established has little effect again (except that you go to prison). The middle section is much more interesting, and this is where I generally advise to tread softly. (But I’m also against stealing.)
Because the way I resolve this tension for me is to assess whether in my immediate environment – the people who are most likely to be directly influenced by me – a norm is potentially about to emerge. If that is the case, and I approve of the norm, I try to always uphold that norm to at least an above average level.
Well, and then there are a few more random caveats:
As the norm not to harm other animals for food becomes stronger, it’ll be less socially awkward for people (outside vegan circles) to eat vegan food. Social effects were (last time I checked) still the second most common reason for vegan recidivism.
As the norm not to harm other animals for food becomes stronger, more effort will be put into providing properly fortified food to make supplementation automatic.
Eroding a budding social norm because it comes at a cost to one’s own goals seems like the sort of freeriding that I think the EA community needs to be very careful about. In some cases the conflict is only due to lacking idealization of preferences or only between instrumental rather than terminal goals or the others would defect against us in any case, but we don’t know any of this to be the case here. The first comes down to unanswered questions of population ethics, the second to the exact tradeoffs between animal suffering and health risks for a particular person, and the third to how likely animal rights activists are to badmouth AI safety, priorities research, etc. – probably rarely.
Being vegan among EAs, young, educated people, and other disproportionately antispeciesist groups may be more important than being vegan in a community of hunters.
A possible, unusual conclusion to draw from this is to be “private carnivor”: You only eat vegan food in public, and when people ask you whether you’re vegan, you tell them that you think eating meat is morally bad, a bad norm, and shameful, and so you only do it in private and as rarely as possible. No lies or pretense.
There’s also the option of moral offsetting, which I find very appealing (despite these criticisms – I think I somewhat disagree with my five-year-old comment there now), but it doesn’t seem to quite address the core issue here.
Another argument you mentioned to me at an EAGx was something along the lines that it’ll be harder to attract top talent in field X (say, AI safety) if they not only have to subscribe X being super important but have to subscribe to X being super important and be vegan. Friend of mine solve that by keeping those things separate. Yes, the catering may be vegan, but otherwise nothing indicates that there’s any need for them to be vegan themselves. (That conversation can happen, if at all, in a personal context separate of any ties to field X.)