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: 578
one point of criticism if this cost-effectiveness estimate: in high-income countries there is no substantial shortage of blood. In case of acute shortage, blood banks can easily recruit donors. So if you don’t donate and that results in a blood shortage of one unit, another donor is likely to step in. If you donate blood, you simply replace the donation: the other donor who would have donated in your place, will not be recruited. Your donation will not be an extra donation. Or in other words: blood donation has low additivity and blood supply is inelastic. The case for plasma might be different, as there is a global plasma undersupply. A plasma donation will not simply be a replacement of someone else’s donation. But I don’t know how many QALY’s you save by donating plasma.
I wrote a comment in a previous discussion about why I think cultivated meat can be expected to become at least as efficient/cheap as animal-based meat: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/y8jHKDkhPXApHp2gb/cultured-meat-a-comparison-of-techno-economic-analyses?commentId=MJtLFZya2WqdNADSy
The basic idea is that animals were not evolved to maximize meat production. Just like horses were not evolved to maximize transport efficiency and hence were replaced by cars, plants were not evolved to maximize turning solar energy into electricity and are replaced by more efficient solar panels, pigs were not evolved to maximize insulin production and were replaced by recombinant-DNA yeast,...
It seems that you make nothing but a very trivial claim, that if you are used to A, a change from A to B is difficult. But then you frame it like B being difficult. But it is the transition which is difficult, not B itself. As an analogy, let’s discuss whether Chinese is difficult. You would say yes, because it is not your native language. It will take some effort for you to learn Chinese. But a Chinese person thinks Chinese is easy, and English is difficult. Who is right? In the end, once you have learned to speak Chinese, it is as easy as most other languages that you have learned. Some languages are objectively more difficult than others (like Dutch is probably more difficult than Afrikaans, and English is more difficult than Esperanto), and for the same reason, some diets are objectively more difficult than others. But you make it look like veganism is objectively more difficult than other diets. I disagree with that: just see how much you have to learn for a healthy diet with meat. I think a healthy vegan diet is as difficult as a healthy omnivorous diet, and an unhealthy vegan diet is as easy as an unhealthy omnivorous diet. Transitions may be difficult, but they involve one time transition costs, which become negligible in the long run. Once you have learned a foreign language, the cost of learning drops to zero, and the new language becomes easy for the rest of your life.
Thanks for the question, had to think a while. About infeasibility of cultivated meat, best counterevidence for me would be seeing a massive disinvestment in cultivated meat R&D, a consensus among researchers openly saying that it is too difficult to make progress.
Another crucial thing that would change my mind, is evidence about the feasibility of plant-based meat, that substitution towards plant-based is faster than I would expect (faster than cultivated meat innovation). This would mean seeing a fast increase in the number of vegans, and especially conservative male meat identifiers switching to plant-based meats.
I think the beatpath method to avoid intransitivity still results in a sadistic repugnant conclusion. Consider three situations. In situation 1, one person exist with high welfare 100. In situation 2, that person gets welfare 400, and 1000 additional people are added with welfare 0. In situation 3, those thousand people will have welfare 1, i.e. small but positive (lives barely worth living), and the first person now gets a negative welfare of −100. Total utilitarianism says that situation 3 is best, with total welfare 900. But comparing situations 1 and 3, I would strongly prefer situation 1, with one happy person. Choosing situation 3 is both sadistic (the one person gets a negative welfare) and repugnant (this welfare loss is compensated by a huge number of lives barely worth living). Looking at harms, in situation 1, the one person has 300 units of harm (400 welfare in situation 2 compared to 100 in situation 1). In situation 2, the 1000 additional people each have one unit of harm, which totals 1000 units. In situation 3, the first person has 200 units of harm (-100 in situation 3 compared to +100 in situation 1). According to person-affecting views, we have an intransitivity. But Schulze’s beatpath method, Tideman’s ranked pairs method, minimax Condorcet method, and other selection methods to avoid intransitivity, select situation 3 if situation 2 were an option (and would select situation 1 if situation 2 was not an available option, violating independence of irrelevant alternatives).
Perhaps we can solve this issue by considering complaints instead of harms. In each situation X, a person can complain against choosing that situation X over another situation Y. That complaint is a value between zero and the harm that the person has in situation X compared to situation Y. A person can choose how much to complain. For example, if the first person would fully complain in situation 1, then situation 3 will be selected, and in that situation the first person is worse-off. Hence, learning about this sadistic repugnant conclusion, the first person can decide not to complain in situation 1, as if that person is not harmed in that situation. Without the complaint, situation 1 will be selected. We have to let people freely choose how much they want to complain in the different situations.
Good points, but I’m a little tiny bit skeptical. So those people who join the group under the name of PISE but would not have joined the group when it was called Effective Altruism Erasmus, I wonder if that is due to the reasons that were mentioned (that the -ism suffix reminds of something religious, makes the name too unfamiliar, too difficult, associated with elitism...). If that would be the case, I would be surprised if those people are potentially high impact effective altruists. To put it overly simplistic: suppose someone would not join because of the word altruism in the name. The person does not like that word or does not even know what it means (like I don’t know what “Marnaism” means). How can such a person (who has such a cognitive bias towards words, is so hypersenstitive to the use of a single word, thinks that an -ism word is too difficult, makes strange associations with religion, or does not even know what altruism means) expected to become a rational, intelligent, self-critical, scientifically literate high impact effective altruist? In the PISE group there are members who should come to the conclusion that if the name were different, they would not have joined? Do the group members realize that?
Not much is known about the impact of climate change on wild animals, so therefore I excluded it. It is very complicated. First, it could still be the case that at the expected level of warming, the decrease in cold deaths of wild animals could be larger than the increase in heat deaths. Less freezing days, but more heat waves and forest fires… Second, it might be the case that most wild animals have a net negative welfare and that climate change decreases population sizes, which means fewer animals with net negative welfare will be born, and that is good in the long run. Third, animals have a shorter lifespan and higher reproduction levels than humans, which means the identities of future born animals may be much more dependent on what we (CO2 emitting beings) do, compared to the influence of our actions on the identities of future born humans. Compare the world where we take climate measures with a business as usual world. Already after a few years you will see that those two worlds will contain different animals. That brings us to the difficult non-identity problem in population ethics. So… it becomes very complicated.
I didn’t particularkly steelman degrowth, because I thought the arguments in favor of degrowth are pretty obvious: you can decrease environmental impact by reducing economic activity and resource throughput. I tried to find reasons why such reductions would be most feasible and most effective, but couldn’t find them.
“I don’t think reducing population is a universal, or even dominant, objective amongst people who support degrowth.”> That’s why I called it the population degrowth approach, to be distinguished from the resource degrowth aproach. The common usage of degrowth refers to resource degrowth. but population degrowthers are arguing in just the same way as resource degrowthers, that reducing X (be it economic activity, consumption or usage of dirty technologies) is not enough, just like resource degrowthers are arguing that reducing Y (e.g. usage of dirty technologies) is not enough. Population degrowthers are skeptical about the potential of consumption reductions (econo-fix), just as resource degrowthers are skeptical about the potential of technology innovations (techno-fix).
“2) It seems pretty clear that rich people produce a lot more emissions—e.g. reports like this or this highlighting huge disparity in emissions between the richest 1% and the poorest 50% globally.”> True, but those richest 1% created 82% of the economic wealth (also from the same Oxfam source: https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/richest-1-percent-bagged-82-percent-wealth-created-last-year-poorest-half-humanity). According to your Oxfam reference, the richest 1% cause 15% of carbon emissions. Hence, 82% of created economic wealth corresponds with only 15% of emissions. If you would reduce all economic wealth creation by the richest people, which means reducing it with 82%, you only reduce carbon emissions with 15%. This proves again my point about the non-linear relationship between GDP (created wealth, income) and carbon emissions. Income growth shows a decreasing marginal environmental impact. That makes degrowth measures like income ceilings less effective.
“3) It’s quite possible capitalism has led to people working more, not less. While a chart like this shows a decline in working hours since the end of the Industrial Revolution, it’s quite plausible people worked far less before the Industrial Revolution”> That could be true, but as long as degrowthers are not arguing to move back to preindustrial societies, I don’t think this point is relevant. Plus, importantly: humans have longer lifespans now compared to preindustrial times. That means it could be the case that I still have more leisure time over my whole life, than someone in the 16th century over her whole life. And what about our pensions? They didn’t have that in the 16th century.
I would expect that cultivated meat can reach price parity with animal-based meat, based on ‘first principles’. Assume that all biological functions in an organism can be replicated with technologies, and that these technologies can reach the same efficiency as the biological functions that reached high efficiency due to evolution and natural selection. That is a realistic assumption, because no laws of nature have to be violated. To grow muscle tissue, we need oxygenation, so we invent a technology, call it ‘lungs’. We need nutrients (amino-acids, sugars,...), so we invent a technology called ‘intestines’ to produce nutrients (e.g. from plant-based sources). If these new technologies are as efficient in doing what they have to do as their organic counterparts in animals, the production costs of cultivated meat and animal-based meat will be the same. However, using animals to produce muscle tissue is not maximally efficient, because of two reasons.
The animal wastes resources (nutrients, energy) on unnecessary organs, tissues and body parts, such as brains, eyes, ears, tails, feathers, pain receptor cells, reproductive organs, hooves,… All these things are not necessary to grow muscle cells. Assume that these unnecessary body parts use 10% of nutrients and energy. Then a production unit (e.g. bioreactor) that does not use these body parts can be 10% more efficient and hence 10% less costly.
Using an animal to harvest muscle cells, the many other body parts that are necessary for muscle growth, such as the lungs (for oxygenation), intestines (for production of the growth medium), skin (for thermal isolation and protection),… need frequent replacement when the muscle cells are harvested, because these body parts are destroyed (in the slaughterhouse). It is like using a bioreactor to grow cultivated meat, and after each batch, we destroy the whole equipment, including all sensors, tubes,… And then we built a new bioreactor (using a factory we call ‘uterus’). That is not efficient, and very costly. I expect not having to construct a new production unit after each production cycle, will make cultivated meat production much more efficient (and hence less costly) than animal-based meat. Assume the production unit for animal-based meat (the necessary body parts, such as the lungs, intestines,… of the animal) consumes 50% of resources for its construction (growth), not having to construct so many production units could save almost 50% of resource use and hence costs.
So I expect with sufficient research, it is only a matter of time when cell-based meat reaches price parity, and it can perhaps drop to 50% of the price of animal-based meat. Plus, I consider it unlikely that none of the technologies can become more efficient than their organic counterparts, because it is unlikely that the current design of an animal is optimal (meaning that the current animal would have reached the final stage of evolution and that none of its organs can be improved).
What is the packing density of muscle cells in muscle tissue (meat)? Why not use that packing density as an estimate for the maximum possible packing density of muscle cells in a bioreactor?
“As you mention, increases in efficiency tend to be followed by equal increases in consumption in society absent other incentives and policies. So it’s understandable that some people might think we need some limits on resource extraction.”>I think it is better to have limits on environmental impact. Price mechanisms such as a carbon tax can be used to counter rebound effects on environmental impacts.
“The 40 hour work week was once unthinkable. So were child labor laws. So was a ban on CFCs.”> Economic growth made these policies much more politically feasible.
“What if people had just given up?”>Anti-degrowth environmentalists are not saying we should give up. They say we should invest more in technological innovation.
“Technology does not develop in a political vacuum, and we would not have seen over 90% cost reductions in technologies like solar during the past 10 years without major investments and support from the Obama administration.”>These are points primarily used by anti-degrowth environmentalists to argue for the importance (effectiveness) of more government funding of clean tech innovation. Degrowth environmentalists, on the other hand, are more skeptical about the importance of such clean tech innovations: they prefer a shrinking economy, where we have less money available for technological research. Looking at degrowth thinkers, organizations, panels and declarations, you don’t see a promotion of increased clean tech innovation funding. It is definitely not a top policy proposal. What you do see, is an explicit rejection (proposal to ban) of some technologies such as genetic modification, nuclear power and nanotechnology, a moratorium on techno-scientific research, an orientation research toward low-tech research and convivial tools, raising awareness about “technological addiction”, opposing digital technologies in education. These are not really helping the acceleration of clean tech innovation.
“Reducing carbon emissions is an example of “degrowth” in one sector of the economy.”> The energy sector can still grow, even when decarbonizing.“The wealthiest 10% of the world are responsible for over half of emissions in 2015.”> But they own 85% of the wealth. Hence, per unit of wealth, they emit less. Suppose you had a policy that annihilates 85% of global wealth, namely all the wealth owned by the richest 10%. The richest 10% can no longer consume anything. That would only reduce emissions with 50%. With clean tech innovation, we can reduce more than 50% of emissions, without such politically unfeasible policies as 85% wealth reduction.
“And we know that happiness barely increases above $75,000 a year,”>Environmental impact also shows such a diminishing marginal effect. Above a certain income, someone’s environmental footprint barely increases when income increases. Richer people have a higher propensity to save than to consume. In high income countries, we see that an increasing income over time even correlates with reduced CO2 emissions (absolute decoupling). Cfr environmental Kuznets curve.
“so is rising GDP really benefiting most people when it mainly goes to the top 10%?”> The rising CO2 emissions mainly go to the bottom 90%...
“For example, banning all new fossil fuel extraction and creating a carbon tax that is used to fund clean energy jobs”>This is not specifically a degrowth policy proposal. Anti-degrowth environmentalists also favor such proposals. Such proposals are compatible with economic growth.
“Most people would prefer to work less so that they can spend more time with friends, family, and passion projects.”>They can choose to do so, in a free market. At least when the labor market is competitive and flexible enough, such that it is easier to chose a job that has less working hours. Instead of degrowth regulations (e.g. maximum work hours per week), it is more effective to increase job flexibility.“and hoping for the best with technology investments.”>You can also say that degrowth environmentalists hope for the best with degrowth campaigns, with income and working hour regulations,…
“1. Why shouldn’t we set sustainable limits on resource extraction and continue to invest in technology?”> Sure, let’s do that. But only set limits on resource extraction when that resource extraction really correspond with environmental impact. What would be the sustainable limit for energy use? Suppose you set a limit on energy use per capita. e.g. 50 kWh per day per person. Now I invent a clean technology, namely feasible nuclear fusion, that can generate trillions of kWh per day. Is my invention not allowed, merely because you chose a limit of 50 kWh/day/person?“Why is ignoring the possibility of running out of resources and betting everything on innovating our way out of all of those limits within a few decades better than a more careful approach?”>If you prefer degrowth, then why do we not have a degrowth world? Why don’t you just make the global economy degrow? Perhaps it is difficult, but then you are betting on feasibility of changing the global economy. In the end, we are interested in cost-effectiveness. Which policy campaigns are most cost-effective: a campaign for degrowth with e.g. income and working hour regulations, or a campaign for increased government funding for clean tech R&D (funded by a carbon tax or an income tax)? Suppose the economy (GDP) grows, and only 1% of the extra income is taxed. This should be extremely feasible. If these tax revenues go to clean tech R&D, we double funding for R&D, which could almost double tech innovation, which could almost double the speed to implement these technologies. We saw a 25% reduction in consumption-based per capita CO2 emissions in dozens of high-income countries in 15 years. Imagine we have in 15 years a 50% reduction…
“There are plenty of people who chop down an entire forest today for a quick buck rather than harvest sustainably in perpetuity, even if the latter would generate more wealth in the long run.”>Why would they chop down the forest so quickly? Because the interest rate is high. But that basically means the marginal productivity of capital is high. Selling the wood and investing in capital, might be the most efficient (productive). Once marginal productivity of capital declines, a lower harvest rate would become optimal. In other words: there is not necessarily a market failure when chopping down a forest. But you may refer to the real underlying market failure: the decrease in a public good such as biodiversity. The most effective policy interventions to solve that problem of biodiversity loss due to clearcutting too much forests, is a taxation, and funding tech innovation to have better alternatives than wood (substitutes for wood).
“2. A lot of people would rather have more time and meaningful work than money. Why should we ignore their preferences”> Why would they not simply choose to work less, if that is what they prefer? Whatever the reason you come up with, I honestly don’t think that economic growth is the main obstacle or reason why they are not so able to choose fewer working hours and more leisure time. In contrast: we do see a negative correlation between economic growth and working hours: a higher GDP correlates with fewer working hours.
“3. It’s not clear to me that all increases in growth and consumption necessarily mean greater happiness, creativity, and innovation forever.”> And it is not clear to me that all decreases in growth and consumption necessarily mean lower CO2 emissions and environmental impacts.
“Why not reduce certain kinds of consumption and use those resources to increase investments in innovation?”> Sure, but that is not incompatible with economic growth.
About split brain; those studies are about cognition (having beliefs about what is being seen). Does anyone know if the same happens with affection (valenced experience)? For example: left brain sees a horrible picture, right brain sees picture of the most joyfull vacation memory. Now ask left and right brains how they feel. I imagine such experiments are already being done? My expectation is that asking the brain hemisphere who sees the picture of the vacation memory, that hemisphere will respond that the picture strangely enough gives the subject a weird, unexplainable, kind of horrible feeling instead of pure joy. As if feelings are still unified. Anyone knows about such studies?
I have some concerns about animal-welfare labelled meat, that it could be counterproductive. See this study: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21606544.2024.2330552
“But it’s hard to shake the feeling that farming cognitively disabled humans would be even worse than farming pigs.” > I think this feeling is a moral illusion, comparable to an optical illusion where it is hard to shake the feeling that one line is longer than another. I wrote some articles about this: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11406-020-00282-7
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10790-015-9507-8
And an infographic
https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/11/08/moral-illusions-infographic/
“in principle, it would be a good thing to farm short-lived happy humans (perhaps for their organs) who would otherwise not get to exist at all. But we find the idea repugnant, and that’s probably also a good thing. It causes us to lose out on some life-saving organs, and the value of the farmed lives themselves; but it may also prevent us from committing worse atrocities against each other.”> I think people who have the strong moral intuition that it is wrong to use mentally disabled orphans as merely a means (as food, organs, experimental objects) do not believe that those humans are in fact not moral subjects but the main reason why we ought not to use those disabled humans is that we are too stupid to make a distinction between them and moral subjects, that we are not able to draw a line, that when we use them, we will also use moral subjects as merely a means.
About the idea of breeding happy beings to use them (e.g. happy slaves, happy farm animals): it is very difficult to justify this without stumbling upon very counter-intuitive conclusions. I wrote an article about population ethics and animal farming, arguing that happy animal farming is problematic and should also be avoided, even if the animals have net positive lives: https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45
“It seems tragic for a human to be stuck with the cognitive capacities of a chicken—we feel that they’ve been deprived of capacities that they ought to have had. By contrast, it isn’t tragic for a chicken to have the cognitive capacity of a chicken.”>Again, I believe this intuition that one thing is more tragic than the other, is a moral illusion, comparable to optical illusions. It is difficult to justify why one thing is more tragic. So, X and Y do not have property P, but the fact that X not having P is worse than Y not having P is because X looks more similar to Z who has property P? In what sense, and how similar? Or X has parents who have property P? Why parents and not cousins? That seems so arbitrary (comparable to arbitrariness behind optical illusions).
″ If we possess a magic pill that would provide typical human intelligence to either individual, it seems we have stronger reason to give it to the cognitively disabled human than to the chicken (bracketing extrinsic factors, like how others would react).”> The only reasons I can think of, are arbitrary, and these are not strong reasons.
Hi David,
sure, I’ve published an easier version, with more concrete examples and without jargon at my website: https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2022/08/23/mild-welfarism-avoiding-the-demandingness-of-totalitarian-welfarism/
I called the theory mild welfarism, hopefully that is not too much jargon? ;-)
Yep, in my new EA Fellowship group, one participant also mentioned that podcast as basic inspiration to join EA. Proof by anecdote.
It seems that with the formulation of the Comparative Interest principle, you already assume an asymmetry. Consider the symmetric (equally reasonable) formulation, by writing ‘better’ instead of ‘worse’ and switching X and Y: An outcome X is in one way better than an outcome Y if, conditional on X, the individuals in X would have a stronger overall interest in outcome X than in Y and, conditional on Y, the individuals in Y would not have an even stronger overall interest in Y than in X.
With this formulation, the procreation asymmetry illustriation looks different: there is an arrow from non-existence to positive existence (top arrow from right to left), but no arrow from negative existence to non-existence.
Your formulation of the comparative interest principle, means that you focus on the tails of the arrows in the figure: an arrow can only be drawn if someone exists (and has interests) at the position of the tail of the arrow. My formulation focuses on the arrowheads: an arrow can only be drawn if someone exists (and has interests) at the position of the head of the arrow. There is a symmetry in choosing heads or tails, so your comparative interest principle is not suitable for a good defense of the procreation asymmetry.
I have another defense, based on my theory of variable critical level utilitarianism (https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2018/02/24/variable-critical-level-utilitarianism-as-the-solution-to-population-ethics/). This is a critical level utilitarianism, where now everyone is free to choose their own critical level. The condition is: everyone should be willing to accept a life at the chosen critical level. This means that no-one will choose a negative critical level. Critical levels always have to be positive. That introduces an asymmetry between the positive and the negative, and this asymmetry is at the root of the procreation asymmetry.
I think happy animal farming (breeding, killing and eating animals who had net-positive lives) is not permissible (except if the animal would be extremely happy). See population ethical arguments against happy animal farming: https://www.pdcnet.org/enviroethics/content/enviroethics_2022_0999_10_26_45
https://stijnbruers.wordpress.com/2016/11/05/can-we-eat-happy-meat/
fully agree, one of the many limitations of using a survey to test the stepping stone model.
My major concern is that this article is too one-sided: it mentions the difficulties/trade-offs of vegan diets, without mentioning difficulties/trade-offs of non-vegan diets. Eating a non-vegan diet is also not easy. Some examples of what you have to tell to people who want to eat animal products:
Don’t eat too much meat, that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites how much gram per day is too much, according to your age and bodily needs.
Fry the meat well enough, because (almost all) meat can contain harmful bacteria. Also wash well enough all the cutlery, the knife, the chopping board and everything that was in contact with the meat, because of contamination risks.
But don’t fry your meat too much. Frying meat can produce carcinogenic substances. Especially when there is a dark or black crust visible, the meat was fried too much. For the same reason, avoid barbeque and flambé. Heating up meat in the microwave oven is not good enough to kill the bacteria. If you don’t know how to cook your meals properly, you can eat vegan meat alternatives: they can be safely eaten even uncooked (or used in the microwave oven).
Don’t drink unpasteurized milk.
Animal products don’t contain dietary fiber, so make sure to eat a proper source of dietary fiber.
Meat doesn’t contain vitamin C, so make sure to eat a proper source of vitamin C. There are websites that tell you which products contain vitamin C.
Avoid processed meat: that is unhealthy. You can look on some websites what counts as processed meat. I think bacon and ham also count as processed.
Many meat products, especially fresh products, don’t show an expiration date on the package. You can look for some information on the internet how to learn to detect when your meat is expired. If you don’t know how to smell expired meat, don’t keep your meat too long in the fridge, or eat plant-based meat alternatives as they show a best before date on the package.
In many cases, cheaper meat products may be unhealthier than more expensive meat products. There is often a trade-off between price and health/quality of the meat product. Consult a nutritionist to figure out the best diet according to your budget.
Almost none of the meat eaters had a recent blood test to check if they have for example too much bad cholesterol that could be the result of eating too much animal products. They also don’t know if their bodies can properly absorb for example the iron in the meat. It is recommended to visit a nutritionist and ask for a blood test.
Some people are allergic to milk, fish, and other animal products. You can consult your doctor if you don’t know about your potential allergies.
These examples should be enough to show that eating animal products is equally difficult as eating vegan. My worry is that focusing too much on vegan nutrition issues (telling people a lot about how to eat a healthy vegan diet), might give people the impression that veganism is difficult, and then they continue eating animal products and causing harm to animals. But focusing too little might be counterproductive as well, because then people don’t eat enough healthy vegan diets, they become ill and revert back to animal products.
So I recommend that when you tell potential vegans how to eat a healthy vegan diet, you also mention the health concerns related to animal products, to make clear that eating a healthy non-vegan diet is equally difficult or easy.