PhD in physics (thermodynamics of ecosystems) and in moral philosophy (animal rights), master in economics, researcher in health and welfare economics at KULeuven, president of EABelgium, environmental footprint analyst at Ecolife
Stijn
Karma: 791
Are fishing and agriculture bad for animals?
I strongly disagree with your position, Christoph.
First, I agree with Marc: this argument to eat ‘happy meat’ (from happy animals) can be easily applied to justify slavery and cannibalism: let’s breed happy slaves, let’s give birth to happy babies and then eat them.
In population ethical terms: once you bring into existence a farmed animal, that animal would be better-off on an animal sanctuary, so they you have a duty not to kill it but to take care of it on a sanctuary. I wrote a paper on this (Population ethics and animal farming, Bruers 2022, https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45). It also follows from my moral theory ‘mild welfarism’, as explained here: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/ . All population ethical views that use cardinal interpersonally comparable welfare and that say that eating happy meat is always better than not breeding farmed animals (e.g. total utilitarianism), entail the repugnant conclusion which in this case means we should breed a huge number of animals, sacrifice ourselves to take care of them on animal sanctuaries such that they have positive lives barely worth living, and definitely not slaughter them. If you believe that the life/welfare of an animal can be compared with non-existence but cannot be compared with the welfare of a human, then you cannot apply those population ethical views like total utilitarianism, and then you can take a view that entails it is permissible or good to eat happy meat. But I think those conditions are very unlikely: if animal welfare can be compared with non-existence, and human welfare can be compared with non-existence, then it is weird why animal and human welfare cannot be compared with each other. It is like heaving a measure with a zero point but no scale. Possible, but weird.
Actually, my theory of mild welfarism gives two reasons why eating happy meat is not allowed: one based on population ethical preferences (to avoid the repugnant conclusion, to respect the procreation asymmetry, to have a more person-affecting view, to be dynamically consistent,...), the other on a deontological principle (not use someone as a means against their will).
So, a coherent ethical theory that gives two arguments against eating happy meat, plus strong intuitions against eating happy babies and breeding happy slaves, makes me pretty confident that eating happy meat is impermissible.
From a practical viewpoint: I think it is harder for consumers to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-based meat products of which the animals had clearly positive lives and where the animals were treated according to their personal animal welfare standards that they would apply to other animals such as dogs, than to find cheap, tasty, healthy animal-free meat products. Organic meat is more expensive than a lot of plant-based meats, and even with organic farming people do not seem to be very confident that those animals have positive lives. People would not eat organic dog meat, for example.
Your claim: “I personally don’t think that alt-protein will result in everybody stopping to eat meat”. I also personally don’t think organic meat will result in everybody stopping eating conventional meat. After all, we have organic meat on the market for more decades than plant-based meat and still not many people are buying organic meat. The organic meat market is growing less than the plant-based meat market.
“So going from a messaging of “ideally everybody should be vegan and let’s trust tech to solve it” to “ideally everybody should treat animal products as something sacred and really care for how they are treated” is something that probably the majority of people could get on board with.” Many people also get on board with cultivated meat tech development.
I agree. It strongly depends on the framing of questions. For example, I asked people how strongly they value animal welfare compared to human welfare. Average: 70%. So in one interpretation, that means 1 chicken = 0.7 humans. But there is a huge difference between saving and not harming, and between ‘animal’ and ‘chicken’. Asking people how many bird or human lives to save, gives a very different answer than asking them how many birds or humans to harm. People could say that saving 1 human is the equivalent of saving a million birds, but that harming one human is the equivalent of harming only a few birds. And when they realize the bird is a chicken used for food, people get stuck and their answers go weird. Or ask people about their maximum willingness to pay to avoid an hour of human or chicken suffering, versus their minimum willingness to accept to add an hour of suffering: huge differences. (I conducted some unpublished surveys about this, and one published: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21606544.2022.2138980.) In short: in this area you can easily show that people give highly inconsistent answers depending on the formulations of the questions.
“On the other extreme end, you can imagine a total equalist.[7] They would say that a chicken and a human are morally equivalent, X=1. They would rather save two chickens from suffering than one human. Given that 86% of the world eats meat, this would also be a rather unpopular opinion. ”
I ran a survey in Belgium: the majority of meat eaters put X=1 (or better: their answers to the questions logically entail X=1) https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2024/05/21/the-suffering-of-a-farmed-animal-is-equal-in-size-to-the-happiness-of-a-human-according-to-a-survey/
That seems like saying: “Let’s not donate to animal charities because there are people who would donate to the most effective human charities but decide to donate to the less effective human charities when they see people who donate to the most effective human charities switch their donations to animal charities.” Probably I’m not following the logic...
Also: if donating to the top-effective animal charities is +100 times as cost-effective as donating to the top-effective human charities, that backfire effect (people donating to the less effective human charities instead of the top effective human charities) should be very strong: more than 100 people should show this backfire effect (i.e. remain non-EA) per effective altruist who donates to top-effective animal charities. That seems very unlikely to me.
“So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.” More generally, I think it is more important to convince an EA human health and development supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to the most effective animal welfare causes, than to convince a non-EA human charity supporter to diversify and donate say 50% of the donation budget to AMF or similar high-impact human-focused charities.
I think there is much room for more funding of alternative protein R&D, and that is very cost-effective to reduce farmed animal suffering
Two important considerations to strongly favor animal welfare
Saving a human life is likely net negative due to increased meat consumption and animal suffering. According to a survey, most people believe the welfare of a farmed chicken is negative and equal in size to the positive welfare of a human. Also most people believe the welfare of birds count almost as much as the welfare of humans (they give animal welfare relative to human welfare an 8 on a scale from 0 to 10). But there are more farmed chickens than humans on earth (3 chickens per human), so total welfare is negative. See also this post: net global welfare is negative and declining. This also means that saving a human (meat eater) most likely negatively contributes to global welfare, as it increases meat consumption and hence farmed animal suffering. This is a strong version of the meat eater problem (strong in the sense that saving humans not only increases animal suffering, but increases it so much that total welfare decreases).
Saving a vegetarian human life is likely less cost effective than avoiding farmed animal suffering. There are extremely cost-effective animal welfare interventions. For example development of alternative protein such as cultivated meat saves the suffering of +10 farmed animals per dollar. An average human eats 10 farmed animals per year. So $100 donation to cultivated meat R&D saves the suffering of 1000 farmed animals, which equals the amount of farmed animal suffering caused by 100 years of meat consumption by a human. In size (absolute value), the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is more than a lifetime of human happiness (roughly 3 times as much). In other words: avoiding the suffering of 1000 farmed animals is better than saving a child’s life such that the child lives 100 happy years. According to GiveWell’s estimate, saving a child’s life costs +1000$. Saving 100 healthy human life years easily costs +10.000$. So avoiding farmed animal suffering is +100 times as cost effective as saving a child’s life (assuming the child is vegetarian or vegan).
I propose to use new terms: Importance, Implementability, Ignoredness. So three I’s, with the I of Impact.
Equation:
Impact = Importance x Implementability x Ignoredness
In Dutch these are the three O’s: Omvangrijk, Oplosbaar, Onderbelicht
Causing harm by neglecting alternatives: how well-intentioned actions can backfire.
the fact that mind is determined by a physical system not necessarily entail epiphenomenalism. My best analogy is the difference between the object language and the metalanguage. In mathematics (number theory, Godel’s theorem), the metalanguage is embedded in the object language. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metalanguage#Embedded In this sense, the metalanguage supervenes on (and is determined by) the object language, but is not an epiphenomenon (and not eliminated either).
What I meant was that from all public outreach, this deep questioning is one of the most cost-effective. If deep questioning is much less cost-effective than other strategies, then surely public outreach in general does not belong to the top effective strategies.
Which opportunity costs were not explored?
I think deep questioning should be done as an ancillary activity which people can do in their free time
Some grassroots animal rights organizations that do a lot of public outreach with volunteers, could perhaps switch to deep questioning, or encourage their volunteers to do so.
Please let me know how I could have earned extra money at those times when I do deep questioning ;-) I think it’s really difficult, if you have some spare time today, to say: I’m going to earn some extra money. But I can imagine spending that spare time to learn some new skills and then use those acquired skill to switch career to a higher paying job. But to me, that’s a difficult strategy. So to me, deep questioning public outreach seems to have a low opportunity cost.
That 0.6$ seems to me very low. The annual revenue of THL is almost $20M, so THL neutralizes the harm caused by 30 million people?
One conservative estimate of the effectiveness of deep questioning
-10% of people reduce meat consumption after the conversation
-for those reducers: 10% reduction of animal products (especially from the small animals)
-reduction fades out after 10 years.
So 10 conversations reduces the harm caused to farmed animals by the annual food consumption of a random person.
I did a small follow up study in my early days of deep questioning, around 2016. I mailed the people I spoke with on the street, a few months after our conversation. 50% responded to my mail, 20% of those respondents said they reduced their meat consumption since our conversation. That could mean 10% of people change their behavior. That seems pretty effective for the difference making risk averse person: it requires only 5 conversations with couples to make some difference. In my recent conversations, at the end of the conversation, roughly half of people say they really intend to reduce their meat consumption, try new meat alternatives. The other half is not interested that much.
I often mention fish, eggs and shrimp, and especially mention that there is more suffering involved with smaller animals. I often mention that it is not good to replace chicken meat with eggs or fish.
A top-effective public outreach: small-farmed-animal reducetarian deep questioning
Thanks for the questions, David. Insects are not really ignored. When I refer to small animals, that includes insects. The transition can happen in many ways, both legally (regulations that decrease chicken farming), economically (taxing chicken meat). Farmers can be asked to sell the land to the government, who turns it into grassland habitat. Social norms could be the major obstacle. Individual consumers can always resist social norms and decrease their consumption of products from small animals, even if that goes against the social norms. And we could of course change social norms. Also, there may be social norms about meat consumption in general, but not about chicken meat consumption. The ask is to reduce chicken meat consumption, which is more feasible than going vegan.
thanks Vasco! Good comments. I added some things about people preferring a world with fewer higher welfare animals above a world with many more animals that have a higher probability of having a very negative welfare. Many people are risk averse, favor an asymmetric population axiology, favor avoiding suffering over creating happiness.
I also added that we should do more research on wild animal welfare and turn the grassland into forests if research shows that animal welfare in forests is sufficiently higher.
Wild animal welfare research and movement building is surely very good, but here I wanted to present something specific that people could actually choose to do right now, instead of “looking for what we could do in the future”.
How to realistically reduce most suffering on earth
Participants could see the title of the survey in their mail, before opening the survey. The participants get rewarded with a small value coupon when completing the survey, so I don’t expect a pro-animal welfare selection bias. There was a question about active involvement level on animal welfare issues. Half of the respondents indicated to are not involved with animal welfare at all, 4% indicated high involvement, meaning e.g. eating no meat. Others had involvements like occasionally signing animal welfare petition. These statistics seem to be right, representative to the Belgian population. The survey was short, so not much difference between completion times. No significant differences in welfare range estimates were observed between people with more or less involvement, men or women,… Only relevant (statistically significant) difference: people with less active involvement had smaller negative estimates of broiler chicken welfare. I expect this to be a fluke, but again this indicates that the survey does not really have a pro animal welfare bias. Could be some social desirability bias, although I expect this to be small in anonymous online surveys of members of a marketing research company panel.
“Still—if I remember correctly—in this case we have some existing studies pointing out that people who just ate beef are less inclined to grant cows sentience, or something similar, so maybe the argument is warranted.” Indeed, the relevant studies:
Bastian B., Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Radke H. (2012). Don’t Mind Meat? The denial of mind to animals used for human consumption. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin vol. 38 no. 2 p.247-256.
Loughnan S., Haslam N. & Bastian B. (2010). The role of meat consumption in the denial of moral status and mind to meat animals. Appetite 55 p.156–159.