The movie Judgment at Nuremberg (1961) caused me to reflect on how people—including myself—might rationalize their contributions to harm, or their lack of responsibility for preventing it.
Avi Norowitz
Karma: 692
I think it’s bad for Beyond Meat’s brand to sell low quality products though as they’ve done in the past.
Their approach seems like the right move to me:
I CAN’T FIND BEYOND CHICKEN STRIPS IN MY GROCERY STORE. ARE THEY DISCONTINUED?
At Beyond Meat, we’re constantly innovating and renovating our products based on consumer feedback. Unfortunately, our Chicken Strips weren’t delivering the same plant-based meat experience as some of our more popular products, like the Beyond Burger and Beyond Sausage. But, there’s good news. We have a team of chefs and scientists who are working on getting an even better, tastier version of Beyond Chicken Strips back on retail shelves and restaurant menus as soon as possible. Until then, we hope you enjoy the Beyond Burger, Beyond Sausage, and Beyond Beef Crumbles, and some new products we have in the works for 2019!
I believe sausages typically contain pork, so Beyond Sausages might make the numbers look a little better.
Beyond Meat also had a disappointing chicken product, but it looks like they’ve discontinued sales, and are working on a better chicken product.
The Charity Entrepreneurship report doesn’t seem to mention that beef cattle spend around half their lives on pasture. They are also including some dairy cattle considerations that don’t apply to beef cattle, e.g. tie stalls. I think this might be skewing their report to a more negative estimate than appropriate.
I think creating distinctions between directly causing harm vs allowing harm to be caused is likely to reduce a person’s effectiveness at doing good in the world. I think causing harm in an abstract way that doesn’t violate social norms is basically OK if it leads to something more good. For instance, if I advocate to a funder to cut funding to a less effective program and use that funding for a more effective program, I am causing harm to the recipients of the program that got cut. I think that’s fine and a good thing to do.
A knowledgable EA friend of mine has suggested using DAFs for the limited purpose of donating appreciated stock to organizations that do not routinely handle such requests. He said at Vanguard, you can open a DAF, donate your appreciated stock to the DAF, instruct the DAF to donate the appreciated stock to the organization(s), and then close the DAF.
You can find some more reliable information here, though not from an EA perspective.
Thanks for following up on this and posting a correction. I’d suggest updating your original post to include your updated fish consumption estimates. Or if that’s too much work, a correction on that post with a link to this new one would be helpful. As it stands now, it still says: “I also excluded fish because there is no significant correlation between income and fish consumption in African countries.” I think people are likely to find your original post when researching the meat eater problem, especially since the corresponding EA Concepts page cites it.
Since there are less than 1 million elephants alive today, even if each elephant has modestly more moral value than each human, elephant welfare is still very unlikely to meet the importance criteria.
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, I agree that many of the considerations for fishmeal and fish oil are similar. I originally wrote this post a long time ago which is why I did not reference your report in it, but I’ve now included it under “Some useful sources.”
A few comments on your report:
Your report says: “These days, any of the fish that are farmed more intensively around the world are carnivorous … ” This was confusing on a first read, but I assume that was a typo and you meant many? As far as I know, the vast majority of farmed fish are omnivorous or herbivorous.
I don’t think it’s correct to say that the fishmeal industry is on the decline. This World Bank report projects low growth through 2030. The current numbers are very high as well. Amongst vertebrates used by humans, feed fish are near the top in number of individuals.
You mention cultured meat as a possibility. A major obstacle to the competitiveness of cultured meat is the need for very low-cost culture media. See Open Phil’s report. To me it seems the approach of growing proteins and fatty acids in yeast, plants, etc. is likely to be relatively more feasible. As you note, companies are working on this already.
As of last month, fishmeal prices seem to be far more expensive than the number you mention, at $1470 per metric ton. Soybean meal prices have increased too though, at $353 per metric ton.
I’m surprised that “After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation” did not win, given that:
It started an important conversation, likely valuable for people seeking EA jobs, people providing EA career advice, and people hiring for EA jobs.
It generated 259 upvotes and 177 comments, which is more than I remember ever seeing.
It must have been unusually difficult for the author to write.
Some information on the use of fish oil in aquaculture
Perhaps a prompt to give optional anonymous, private, and/or brief constructive feedback after each upvote/downvote could help posters learn what was good/bad about the post while avoiding most of the costs of posting a lengthy comment.
The eligibility criteria seems to rule out nearly all EA-aligned organizations:
“Nominees must meet the following requirements to be eligible … ”
“Legal residents of one (1) of the fifty (50) United States or the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, or Canada (excluding Quebec) (“Territory”)”
“A creator or founder of a social impact organization (“Organization”) that … Has a primary objective related to improving health, education, or esteem or to leadership development and serves low- and middle-income women and/or children in the Territory. (The Organization may have tangential operations outside of the Territory, but, to be eligible for this contest, its core mission and programming must be directed within the Territory.)
I agree with Jim’s comment above. As the graph here suggests, the supply of wild fish appears to have been flat since the 90s, and the increase in demand has been met by the supply of farmed fish. So I think it’s likely that consumption of wild fish will just cause someone else to consume farmed fish instead.
With regard to fish oil: Most of it originates from small wild fish such as anchovies. There’s an entire industry dedicated to harvesting fish oil and fishmeal, and most of it is used as feed for carnivorous farmed fish like salmon. Fish oil seems to be mostly supply constrained as well, and the aquaculture industry is responding by feeding carnivorous fish more plant oils. I’ve written about this here and here, and should probably move these to the EA Forum now that less polished posts are encouraged.
Thanks for working on this! I’m impressed by this and your other work on identifying and investigating groups of farmed animals that exist in large numbers but have been overlooked by other EAs, researchers, advocates, etc.
There is also a discussion of the paper on Facebook.
Government social safety nets for elderly people (such as Social Security in the US) reduce the need for young adults to provide direct care to their elderly parents. This seems likely related.
To me this seems more of an expansion in moral circles though. Most of us in the developed world now seem to think that we’re responsible for everyone’s elderly parents rather than just our own.
An update: We’ve sent follow-up e-mails to all organizations expected to receive a nontrivial amount of donations and/or matches informing them the amounts they should be receiving. Some organizations have helpfully reported to us the donated, matched, and/or total amounts that either (a) Facebook informed them they’ll be receiving or (b) they’ve already received. For the organizations that have reported at least some of this information, the table under “Estimated from Fundraisers vs. Reported by Organizations” on our “Donated and Matched Data” page shows the amounts we’ve estimated from fundraiser page data vs. the amounts reported to us by the organizations.
It’s Dustin and Cari’s money, so it’s their decision what to do with it.