In your argument you mention that going vegetarian is like “donating to a random developing world charity because it relieves the suffering of an impoverished child more than foregoing $5 increases your suffering.” To make the analogy with vegetarianism more appropriate, you would also have to be the overwhelming cause of that child’s misery unless you gave the $5.
Katja actually already grants this point, in a roundabout way. She lists “You consider the act-omission distinction morally relevant” as a reason you might be vegetarian even granting her calculations. In the general population I think perhaps most people would consider the distinction morally relevant. In the EA community, it’s a smaller fraction. I think even if you don’t grant the act-omission distinction as theoretically grounded, it has some value as a heuristic, but this would have less than an order of magnitude effect on the conclusions I’d draw from the calculations.
Finally, I won’t comment on your calculations, but I find them deeply problematic.
I’d love to hear a bit about what you find problematic. I think a great advantage of using explicit calculations like this is not that I trust the numbers entirely, but it makes it much easier to find the source of disagreements. But you need to say what you find wrong about them for that to work!
Katja actually already grants this point, in a roundabout way. She lists “You consider the act-omission distinction morally relevant” as a reason you might be vegetarian even granting her calculations. In the general population I think perhaps most people would consider the distinction morally relevant. In the EA community, it’s a smaller fraction. I think even if you don’t grant the act-omission distinction as theoretically grounded, it has some value as a heuristic, but this would have less than an order of magnitude effect on the conclusions I’d draw from the calculations.
I’d love to hear a bit about what you find problematic. I think a great advantage of using explicit calculations like this is not that I trust the numbers entirely, but it makes it much easier to find the source of disagreements. But you need to say what you find wrong about them for that to work!