Vegetarian or not..?
I’ve been a vegetarian for over 10 years. My EA insights have made me start questioning if I should start eating meat again, at least occasionally. I’d like to share my thought process and have it challenged!
Thought 1 - Vegetarian diet vs effective charities
There are definitely much more effective ways to impact animal wellfare than being a vegetarian. Giving to the right charity has magnitudes greater impact than me not eating meat. I think everyone in this forum agrees on that, right?
Thought 2 - Just do both...
Can’t I just do both? Give to the effective charities and keep a vegetarian diet? Yeah maybe, but then I learned about moral/self-licensing...
If I’ve got this straight, studies show that if I’ve done a good deed, I’m less likely to do another one. A vegetarian diet is a good deed (not the most effective, but still a good deed) when it comes to factory farming.
I don’t think I’m “above” the self licensing effect just because I know of it. So I’m probably less likely to do as much of the more effective deeds because of being a vegetarian.
Thought 3 - Focus only on what’s most effective
EAs pride ourselves on going “all in” on the most effective interventions. Not focusing energy/time on things that also do good, but less effectively.
So that would encourage me to go all in on the right charities and stop the less effective dietary restriction.
Thought 4 - A bit inconvenient
Keeping a vegetarian diet sacrifices some quality of life for me. Not much, but definitely some. Eating out or at friends/family adds a bit of inconvenience. Also, even if I’d likely keep to vegetarian meals most of the time, I miss some non-vegetarian dishes that I found extra tasty.
Thought 5 - The pro-vegetarian argument
The pro-vegetarian argument that resonates most with me is “if you think something is a moral atrocity, you shouldn’t participate in it, even if you offset the effects of your contribution.” The deontological argument, well described in the post Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism.
But I find it difficult to weigh that against the 4 other ones I listed above.
Keen to read some of your thoughts on this!
My sister was a vegetarian for 15 years before I became one. She normalised it for me. I think I’ve normalised it for other people. This sort of ripple effect is impossible to measure but it gives us more reason to uphold admirable behaviour.
Yeah I agree that me being a vegetarian probably normalises it. But is it really impossible to estimate the impact of that? My EA intuition tells me that if it was measured somewhat accurately, it’d still be magnitudes lower impact than giving to effective charities.
Ill respond to all thoughts
Correct.
One way of viewing altruism is that you have an energy bar of it and you should spend it wisely. The other way of viewing it is more like exercising muscles at the gym. I think in general, the 2nd view has slightly more merit and much more than we like to give it credit for since it’s inconvenient. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/DBcDZJhTDgig9QNHR/altruism-sharpens-altruism
I don’t think EA says that, at least in practice. I know of no EAs that donate all money above what they absolutely require, have no outside hobbies, etc.
Most of EA is inconvenient. That’s fair.
I agree, I would also supplement with my comment I left here where similar things were discussed.
Thanks, a lot of things for me to reflect on and deep dive into.
I think the moral/self licensing perspective is intresting. I want to view it as exercising at the gym rather than the energy bar. It feels more intuitive and something I’d like to be true.
But the evidence I’ve read in “Thinking fast and slow” and “Doing good better” makes me think the truth is more like the energy bar.
There are many more arguments both for and against that I’m not going to enumerate here, but are definitely available elsewhere in the forum. I’ll also plug that I agree with Henry’s comment—there are grassroots effects that are hard to measure, but my intuition is they have sneakily high EV.
But the main argument for me, and many other vegans (and vegetarians, but I’ll just say vegans for brevity) I know, is that at some point, they stop wanting to eat meat. If one truly views it as a chore, it will always be seen as a sacrifice. However, if the notion of eating animal products truly grosses you out, then it’s basically easier to be vegan than to eat meat.
I am not trying to deny that animal products can smell or taste great! But at this point, if I were to have a bite of chicken, the first thought for me would be “I am eating this factory farmed chicken that lived a horrible life of abject suffering” and not “hey, this tastes good.” It just grosses me out. Perhaps this would be a corollary to your point 5, but at some point, the dedication to the diet becomes more internalized. At that point, points 2 and 3 somewhat fall off, because it’s just a baseline lifestyle rather than part of my EA-aligned activities.
(To be clear, I acknowledge that this isn’t a universal vegan experience. I don’t mean to invalidate longtime committed vegetarians/vegans who don’t view meat the same way I do. I just mean to point out that there is potentially some light at the end of the tunnel that makes committing to this diet/lifestyle significantly easier. For me, that was about one year after transitioning from vegetarianism to veganism. Watching Dominion helped lock in any remaining doubts I may have had at the 1.5-2 year mark.)
Yeah good point. I’m not as grossed out by eating meat as many other vegetarians. But I get that it’s a good argument for many!
I’m struggling to understand your framing of the moral licensing argument. “Moral licensing” is widely considered to be self-deceiving weakness where people convince themselves that as they’ve done something moral they can happily make other choices with complete indifference to their moral consequences rather than a pragmatic approach to optimising altruism. In that sense, the idea that that participating in some small way in a campaign against meat alleviates any concern about about possible moral implications of eating it” is a pretty pure example of moral licensing, whereas it seems non-obvious that the impactful pro-animal activity you would only feel able to participate in if you ate meat again actually exists...
Some people hold sincere beliefs in animal welfare matters whilst eating meat they believe to be “cruelty free” is fine and if you’re one of them, or feel it’s impossible to avoid eating it or simply don’t think it’s an issue that’s different,[1] but “I might need to start doing things I think are bad again because I’m concerned that otherwise I might be less capable of doing things which are good” doesn’t feel like the right lesson to be learning from EA
I am not suitably qualified to tell people to never eat meat...
I think the question is how much you view being vegetarian as a burden/a good deed that you are doing vs just a feature of your everyday life. For me, I don’t even think about it, so I don’t believe that I have the “good deed offset” issue you mentioned. But others may be different!
A second question is how much weight you give to a deontological moral system being correct—e.g. you probably wouldn’t eat factory farmed humans regardless of how that might affect your other actions because that seems immoral.
A third question is what would the replacement activity for being vegetarian be? Would you realistically replace that with something as comparably high impact (e.g. - eating a serving of chicken requires ~4 hours of ~torturing the chicken to get you the food—do you think whatever you would replace that with would be worth torturing a chicken for four hours? If you aren’t spending the extra time donating more to effective animal charities that seems like a high bar to clear.)
Lastly, you can avoid much of the negative impact of meat eating if you eat from places here you are highly confident in the good treatment of animals (difficult to do but possible) or just eat beef and bivalves (much easier). So if you do change I’d recommend being thoughtful about it like you would with all other decisions!
Thanks, a lot of great things to reflect on for me.
“how much you view being vegetarian as a burden/a good deed that you are doing vs just a feature of your everyday life”
I think that if someone asked me what I think of factory farming, I’d reply I think it’s terrible. Then if they asked if I do anything about it I’d instantly say “yeah I don’t eat meat”. So I definitely see it as a good deed. Even though it’s not something I think about everyday.
“you probably wouldn’t eat factory farmed humans regardless of how that might affect your other actions because that seems immoral”
Good point. I’ll have to think about this one a bit!
“eat from places here you are highly confident in the good treatment of animals”
Hmm yeah maybe. But I think my main point is that doing that, or cutting out meat completely, has such a small effect on animal wellfare that it’s not worth spending time/energy on. Eating that type of meat probably costs more, so just buying the cheap meat and giving the savings to effective charities would do much more good. Just like buying regular coffee instead of fair trade coffee does.