I think this makes sense but that eating meat is one of the things that’s really worth avoiding, just as an article titled confessions of a serial killing ethicist would strike one as odd. By eating meat one causes others hundreds of years of extreme agony over the course of their life while risking violating huge numbers of rights. It’s also not at all obvious that veganism runs counter to one’s interests given the health benefits. The only thing that’s remotely on the same scale in importance is donating and maybe in your case doing valuable research. But eating meat isn’t just a minor foible like being rude to someone--of all the things you do that wrong others it is by far the worst.
I think social normalcy makes a big psychological difference here. So maybe a better analogy would be to a slave-holding abolitionist (in a society where almost everyone around them also holds slaves). My argument would imply that their personal slave-holding isn't as morally significant as the question of their contributions to the larger abolitionist cause.
Of course, any non-consequentialist is going to find this appalling. Which makes it weird that veganism is so strongly associated with utilitarianism. The non-consequentialist case for it is vastly stronger. If you want to be the kind of person who wouldn't have held slaves when all your peers were doing it, you'd better be a vegan now. (But that's not a consequentialist consideration.)
In either case, you're quite right that the absolute impact of one's personal behaviour isn't "minor". (At least if talking about the typical American diet. If one literally only ate the occasional cheeseburger and no other meat, that would be objectively pretty minor.) But it can still be *comparatively* minor, because it's so swamped by the significance of one's choices about where & how much to donate.
I think a better analogy than a slave-holding abolitionist would be a cotton-wearing abolitionist. Someone who buys a cheeseburger is making a small choice that slightly increases the profitability of cattle-farming, the same way someone who bought cotton clothing in 1850 would be slightly increasing the profitability of slavery. They aren't significantly profiting off slavery like a slaveowner is.
I don't think the people in 1850 who bought cotton clothing were bad people, or that they were hypocrites if they were also abolitionists. If someone mostly bought wool, but occasionally bought cotton clothing that they really liked I'd say they were a much-better-than-average person. I don't think reasonable non-consequentialists find it appalling that abolitionists in the 1850s bought cotton sometimes.
I should also note that a cheeseburger is probably the least morally problematic of meat-based foods. Cows do not suffer in factory farming to the same degree that pigs and chickens do, it's quite likely that their lives are worth living (of course, this is due to the fact that cows can't be farmed the same way as pigs and chickens, not that cattle ranchers are more virtuous than pig and chicken farmers). Even if factory farming was bad for cows, ground chuck is the least profitable type of meat, so it isn't terribly bad compared to eating a steak.
I find it difficult to understand why on this one point many EAs seem so resistant to ordinary consequentialist reasoning when they'll follow it to the counterintuitive ends of the earth everywhere else.
I expect that you'd actually get more agreement about the actual cotton wearing abolitionist being okay than the meat eating non-speciesist utilitarian!
I think of my being what would be called "fully vegan" in terms of evolutionary psychology: our species is very good at holding to taboos, and it's great that I've now conditioned my brain to think of eating cows, pigs, chickens or fish the way most of my compatriots think of eating dogs, dolphins or parrots. By contrast, we're embarrassingly bad at proportional changes, such as eating less or exercising more for weight loss, playing video games less, etc. So I went with the taboo.
I've enjoyed reading this article! While it seems counterintuitive and almost a bit frustrating, I agree that donations, career choices and the like matter much more than personal consumption habits.
I wonder though, how often these are mutually exclusive. For instance, donations (even well-researched ones) can take as little time as a few minutes per month... It would be difficult to argue that donating money harms my ability to make ethical food choices. Conversely, while eating more vegan food can be countercultural, time-consuming and unappealing, can we honestly claim that it reduces out ability to get the big picture ethical decisions right?
I admit that I've had pointless discussions about the morality of plastic bags, and emotional debates about food choices... So OK, there can be harm done by becoming too invested in these things. Yet a broadly consequentialist person, who gets the big picture, might find it surprisingly easy to also make moral day-to-day food choices. They might enjoy having fewer cognitive dissonances and be perceived as person of high integrity.
Yes, I think a lot just depends upon one's personal psychology here -- presumably the difficulty will vary significantly between individuals. Anyone who can *easily* make better decisions certainly has especially strong reasons to do so!
It might be a question of priority. Humans are creatures of habit, able to automate (explicitly or mentally) many tasks. Consider someone in their forties, who has monthly automatic bank transfers to effective charities, who is on a good track in a thoughtfully planned career, who has made a conscious plan for (or against) having a family... will this person reach a point when all high-stakes moral decisions have been made and all high-stake behaviors have become habitual? A point when more effort in high-stake areas only yields small diminishing returns? If yes, this might be the point when diet choice starts to be the next most important moral decision.
Or maybe that's the wrong model... maybe life is a constant struggle against our inner wolves, where each day we spend all our effort to get the high-impact decisions right, never having the leisure to think about such inconsequential things as food choices?
Or maybe that's too simplistic... and we instead live in a complex world, where every day presents moral dilemmas that we have not encountered before. A world where there is always more work to do, always new moral mistakes to avoid, and every day has opportunities far greater than cooking a vegan meal.
I guess I was implicitly thinking of something a bit like your first model, except that the monthly transfer is never quite as generous as it *could* be, and so a bit more effort could be productively used towards boosting that higher.
But that model could be wrong. In particular, it could be that at a certain point one just isn't open to accepting further financial costs, and so then dietary improvements might be the next most important change (that one is open to making)...
Neat post! It flirts with -- but doesn't quite cross over into -- what I call "The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot" reasoning. On this reasoning, if you tried any harder to do the right thing, you'd actually end up doing worse, because you'd exhaust yourself or lose your inspiration or something. So if the idea is "I've only got so much effort to give, so I'm going to give it to the most effective things, rather than giving it to less effective things" -- as though your total moral effort were a fixed sum, you'd be doing reasoning of this sort. Thoughts about this issue, in relation to your post?
Yeah, it overlaps in sharing the commitment to effectiveness, but diverges in that I'm not positing any "happy coincidence": *of course* I could do better than I currently do! Still, at whatever level of moral effort one is willing to expend, better to use those efforts optimally.
So there's no attempt here to justify the bad action: I agree it's unjustified, and it would be better to try harder. But we're all so *thoroughly* morally imperfect that even those extra efforts could probably be used more productively than on remedying the original wrong we began with.
So in that sense, very different vibes from the self-congratulatory "sweet spot" reasoning that you (rightly) criticize.
Right -- makes sense! There's some kind of efficiency of badness in the background maybe -- an efficient tradeoff between moral badness and self-interest.
Two questions about how this approach may be implemented, pertaining to the *ease of doing the alternative* and the *frequency one might fail to do what they're unjustified in doing*.
1) Imagine two scenarios. First, I'm at a restaurant that has both a clearly labeled vegan menu and a clearly labeled non-vegan menu. Assume for the sake of simplicity that the counterpart items (meat burger, plant burger) are equally priced and equally nutritionally (d)efficient. Second, I'm at a restaurant that only has a clearly labeled non-vegan menu.
Granting the thoughts that purchasing meat is comparatively less bad than, say, failing to donate to an efficient charity (since convincing someone to donate to an efficient animal charity is "even better" than convincing them to eat plant-basedly) and that purchasing meat is something we need not feel so bad about, I do have a sense that I should feel worse for ordering a meat burger in the first scenario than in the second.
And I have this sense even if we stipulate that I am a person for whom becoming vegan would be psychologically difficult (say, because it disrupts certain cultural practices of mine) or difficult with respect to my time ( because I have to learn to cook new foods), etc. (I include this bit in an attempt to handle the *low-hanging-fruit* post you link at the end of section 2 here.)
Q: Does the approach suggested here yield different verdicts about ordering the meat burger in these two cases?
2) Q: If we grant that *for each instance* of purchasing meat, an agent need not feel so bad about it (we can stipulate that they do donate to effective charities and things of that sort), might they just always purchase meat and try to write that off using this approach?
This might just be an expected result, given the admission here that we "should be vegan" but we needn't feel so bad about not being vegan. But something feels off (to me) with the idea of a person *abusing* this approach.
I'm not sure about the first one. My initial inclination is to think that, to minimize situational moral luck, our moral self-conception should be more based on our dispositions than on the particular acts we end up performing. If you wouldn't pick a vegan option even if it were available, that's enough to establish that you possess the minor moral flaw in question. Being in a situation where it isn't even available doesn't make you a better person, after all.
On your second question, I think we just need to separate out a bunch of different dietary dispositions:
* Making no moral effort whatsoever in relation to one's consumer choices
* Picking the lowest-hanging fruit in relation to ethical consumption (avoiding chicken, etc.)
* Various levels of greater effort with greater moral payoff...
* Committing to minimizing harm in each instance.
Then the question is just, for each of these levels of increasing ethicality, (i) how much effort would it take to reach (and stick to) this level? and (ii) how much good would this achieve (compared to other uses of that same moral effort)?
I'm not sure I understand what effort you are referring to. I generally find that being vegan is less effort than not being. Afterall, it is literally ‘not doing a thing’. For example, it is common for restaurant menus to have very easily identifiable labels of what is vegan. There are fewer options, which means less reading to do (less effort). In some cases, there is only a single vegan option, reducing my effort to almost nothing. While it can take my friends up to ten minutes to decide what to order, my job is done in the three seconds that it takes me to find the single green leaf symbol on the menu. I don’t even have to read what it is.
Or by effort do you mean overcoming the willpower to eat certain foods that you enjoy? I derive very little enjoyment from eating food (an extraordinarily convenient trait) and perhaps that makes it hard for me to understand. But I still don’t see how that effort conflicts with your ability to do other ethical things.
I am a very big proponent of the idea that your consumption choices do not need to be ‘all or nothing’. Often choosing vegan without being a full-on vegan is far better than the consumption habits of most people. Would you at least say that there is no justifiable reason to not chose vegan options any time that doing so is of equal or less effort than eating animals?
People vary: I'm certainly not claiming that *everyone* finds it difficult to commit to veganism. But many clearly do. (Just as many find it hard not to eat junk food.)
I wouldn't necessary say that the effort "conflicts" with doing other good things. It's presumably always possible to do more. My thought was just that, whatever effort one puts towards mentally committing oneself to veganism, *that very effort* could more fruitfully be put towards committing oneself to donating more. (But that is psychological speculation on my part. Perhaps some people have cause-specific willpower deposits, such that effort spent on improving your diet for some reason *couldn't* have been put towards other ends. I'm not sure why that would be. Just flagging it as a logical possibility that I'm assuming is typically not the case.)
And yes, absolutely agree that there's no reason to put extra effort into doing the morally worse thing if you could more easily do the better thing. (Maybe there are special cases where eating meat is the better thing, e.g. in the rare cases that it promotes *happy* animal lives that would otherwise not exist at all.)
Thanks Richard. Isn't your argument much less persuasive if it doesn't even seem to persuade you? It seems odd and also ineffective to deliberately and needlessly fund and support a system that you know is an abomination while simultaneously working to end it? Just as it would be for intra-human justice causes. Systemic change is deeply important but if we only focus on that I fear we'll abandon personal ethics completely (e.g. is being racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/slave-owning/abusive/violent really OK as long as we're combatting these things at a "systemic" level?!?!). That approach, while itself unethical, also perpetuates the bad systems - which comprise individual decisions. Us humans are desperate for excuses not to change. I fear you've just provided another - for yourself and everyone else (the system) too?
I'm not saying any of it is OK. Just that it's better to prioritize one's moral self-improvements in whatever ways will actually do the most good. Which could well recommend supporting justice-oriented organizations *before* one tries to rid oneself of all unjust personal attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors.
I get that you're not saying it's OK. That's the core problem - that you know it's an abomination and yet you decide not to make a fairly easy personal change. Others see that you, a brilliant, thoughtful, caring person - take this path. And they're likely to follow your example.
This isn't a scarcity choice between a) supporting justice-oriented organisations or b) acting more justly. There's a more consistent, coherent option of: c) doing both because they reinforce each other. It's practically pretty easy and psychologically freeing!
I know focusing on the wrongness of something considered "normal" is difficult so maybe there's another better framing - the opportunity you have in making easy yet radical personal changes and talking openly about them. The positive ripples you could send by committing to conceptually and practically (as far as you reasonably can) rejecting intra-human discriminations/needless violence/abuse/animal exploitation & harm & killing etc. would be powerful. As a compassionate, thoughtful person you have serious influence on those who read your work. Those ripples will not only drive important personal changes but systemic ones too. Everyone's a winner - and you'll feel better in yourself too!
I think it's unlikely that anyone *would* have become a vegan but for my writing this. But I'm hopeful that, via the example of this post, some non-vegans may be encouraged to donate to effective animal charities when they otherwise wouldn't have!
It's hard to know and I hope you're right. But I do fear writing this may turn some away from veganism. It's a pattern I've seen in many others. Your audience are likely too curious to deny or ignore or avoid the topic, too compassionate and logical to arbitrarily exclude non-humans from moral consideration and too intellectually rigorous to warp the definitions of words like "humane" or "compassionate". But you risk showing them another option - accepting cognitive dissonance instead of working to resolve it - and accepting akrasia.
I also fear that if modelling akrasia shows people a path away from veganism it may also show them a path away from donating to effective animal charities. If a clear stance against an ethical abomination doesn't impact our personal choices re: consumption decisions and the resulting social signalling opportunity - why should it impact our personal choices re: activism?
If we really can't overcome our akrasia maybe the best approach in public is to focus on the clarity and power of our ethics rather than on our decision not to act on them?
And in a desperate attempt to balance what might seem like a whiny tone (so hard to avoid when considering ethical abominations!)... think of the opportunity of publicly making this pretty easy practical switch. The ripples of influence you and your readers generate as a result might even surpass the benefits of your much appreciated compassionate donations! :)
Perhaps I'm missing the nuance of your post, but nonetheless I'll ask: why not do both? I.e donate effectively and don't eat animals.
I'm not convinced one can only donate effectively or go vegan, nor am I convinced that these trade off substantially against each other. Assuming you are trying to do as much good as possible, why risk potentially increasing demand for meat and causing the death of an animal(s) when you can not?
The phrasing of "personal consumption decisions have got to be way down the list of priorities" makes it sound as though one has to work from top to bottom. Each time you choose your lunch though you're already down that part of the list deciding whether or not to eat an animal. You are making the decision.
You can always ask "why not do a better thing?" (e.g. however much you donate, "Why not donate more?"), and in a sense the obvious answer is to agree that yes, the better thing would be better. Still, none of us are morally perfect so we're none of us always going to actually *do* the better thing on every possible occasion. We all inevitably make moral compromises.
My suggestion is just that compromising on diet isn't such a big deal, and is positively better than compromising on the extent (or effectiveness) of one's donations. So insofar as one is willing to accept some further personal cost, or make some further moral effort to do better, I would generally urge prioritizing more and better donations as a higher priority than optimizing one's personal consumption.
The exception, of course, is when someone would find it *very easy* to go vegan. But people vary. For anyone for whom it would take a significant deliberate effort, I think that effort could be better used elsewhere.
Thank you for taking the time to reply! That's kind of you.
Zvi once quipped about "deontological vegans" in the EA space. I sometimes wonder if I've become one.
"You can always ask "why not do a better thing?" "
I'll bite the bullet and say yes, this is effectively what I'm asking. I don't think asking that you not eat animals is akin to asking moral perfection of you. If you care sufficiently about animals (and I don't doubt that you do) such that you'll donate your own wealth to help them, why not also stop eating them as well? Surely you can manage both.
I think the crux is that I believe compromising on diet is a big deal and (over a lifetime) will result in more animals needlessly dying. I probably think the bar to going vegan is much lower than you do and so don't see it as realistically trading off against donating.
I hope my response doesn't come across as hostile. I enjoy your writings and enjoyed your conversation with Walter Veit.
(e.g. donating a substantial portion of my income, pursuing intellectually honest inquiry into important questions, and maintaining a generally forthright and co-operative disposition towards others)
Not sure this is as valorous as it sounds:
1) donating income is worthless and only makes you less capable of doing what is necessary. Instead, donate your time, not to vain projects like habitat for humanity, but instead in ways that redistribute risk. In your case, this would mean raising and directing capital, NOT giving away a portion of yours (which offsets tax burden further destabilizing society.
2) Honest inquiry directed at important questions...honest and important according to whom? Yourself I suppose. Not that you are in any way intentionally dishonest, but the activity in itself doesnt scale and is easily manipulated by those without your capacity. Instead, seek out the worst in the world and engage them seriously and extensively, which at times may include addressing unimportant and using manipulative, dishonest tactics, which we all use in one form or another and should acknowledge more regularly.
3) Forthrightness and cooperation are very important BUT it depends on the reason. Are you being forthright to get out of an annoying conversation, or to make progress more effectively? Cooperation is also difficult to asses. Are you finding compromises towards a mutual goal, or acting as a self inflated thought leader? Instead, really get into it with people. Its good to disagree and argue AS LONG AS you maintain the conversation. Leaving because someone wont capitulate accomplishes nothing but justify other dismissive action.
Again, I'm not accusing you of any of these, just pointing as that as principles, they are not as clear cut or productive as they may sound on the surface.
I think this makes sense but that eating meat is one of the things that’s really worth avoiding, just as an article titled confessions of a serial killing ethicist would strike one as odd. By eating meat one causes others hundreds of years of extreme agony over the course of their life while risking violating huge numbers of rights. It’s also not at all obvious that veganism runs counter to one’s interests given the health benefits. The only thing that’s remotely on the same scale in importance is donating and maybe in your case doing valuable research. But eating meat isn’t just a minor foible like being rude to someone--of all the things you do that wrong others it is by far the worst.
I think social normalcy makes a big psychological difference here. So maybe a better analogy would be to a slave-holding abolitionist (in a society where almost everyone around them also holds slaves). My argument would imply that their personal slave-holding isn't as morally significant as the question of their contributions to the larger abolitionist cause.
Of course, any non-consequentialist is going to find this appalling. Which makes it weird that veganism is so strongly associated with utilitarianism. The non-consequentialist case for it is vastly stronger. If you want to be the kind of person who wouldn't have held slaves when all your peers were doing it, you'd better be a vegan now. (But that's not a consequentialist consideration.)
In either case, you're quite right that the absolute impact of one's personal behaviour isn't "minor". (At least if talking about the typical American diet. If one literally only ate the occasional cheeseburger and no other meat, that would be objectively pretty minor.) But it can still be *comparatively* minor, because it's so swamped by the significance of one's choices about where & how much to donate.
I think a better analogy than a slave-holding abolitionist would be a cotton-wearing abolitionist. Someone who buys a cheeseburger is making a small choice that slightly increases the profitability of cattle-farming, the same way someone who bought cotton clothing in 1850 would be slightly increasing the profitability of slavery. They aren't significantly profiting off slavery like a slaveowner is.
I don't think the people in 1850 who bought cotton clothing were bad people, or that they were hypocrites if they were also abolitionists. If someone mostly bought wool, but occasionally bought cotton clothing that they really liked I'd say they were a much-better-than-average person. I don't think reasonable non-consequentialists find it appalling that abolitionists in the 1850s bought cotton sometimes.
I should also note that a cheeseburger is probably the least morally problematic of meat-based foods. Cows do not suffer in factory farming to the same degree that pigs and chickens do, it's quite likely that their lives are worth living (of course, this is due to the fact that cows can't be farmed the same way as pigs and chickens, not that cattle ranchers are more virtuous than pig and chicken farmers). Even if factory farming was bad for cows, ground chuck is the least profitable type of meat, so it isn't terribly bad compared to eating a steak.
I find it difficult to understand why on this one point many EAs seem so resistant to ordinary consequentialist reasoning when they'll follow it to the counterintuitive ends of the earth everywhere else.
I expect that you'd actually get more agreement about the actual cotton wearing abolitionist being okay than the meat eating non-speciesist utilitarian!
I think of my being what would be called "fully vegan" in terms of evolutionary psychology: our species is very good at holding to taboos, and it's great that I've now conditioned my brain to think of eating cows, pigs, chickens or fish the way most of my compatriots think of eating dogs, dolphins or parrots. By contrast, we're embarrassingly bad at proportional changes, such as eating less or exercising more for weight loss, playing video games less, etc. So I went with the taboo.
I've enjoyed reading this article! While it seems counterintuitive and almost a bit frustrating, I agree that donations, career choices and the like matter much more than personal consumption habits.
I wonder though, how often these are mutually exclusive. For instance, donations (even well-researched ones) can take as little time as a few minutes per month... It would be difficult to argue that donating money harms my ability to make ethical food choices. Conversely, while eating more vegan food can be countercultural, time-consuming and unappealing, can we honestly claim that it reduces out ability to get the big picture ethical decisions right?
I admit that I've had pointless discussions about the morality of plastic bags, and emotional debates about food choices... So OK, there can be harm done by becoming too invested in these things. Yet a broadly consequentialist person, who gets the big picture, might find it surprisingly easy to also make moral day-to-day food choices. They might enjoy having fewer cognitive dissonances and be perceived as person of high integrity.
Yes, I think a lot just depends upon one's personal psychology here -- presumably the difficulty will vary significantly between individuals. Anyone who can *easily* make better decisions certainly has especially strong reasons to do so!
It might be a question of priority. Humans are creatures of habit, able to automate (explicitly or mentally) many tasks. Consider someone in their forties, who has monthly automatic bank transfers to effective charities, who is on a good track in a thoughtfully planned career, who has made a conscious plan for (or against) having a family... will this person reach a point when all high-stakes moral decisions have been made and all high-stake behaviors have become habitual? A point when more effort in high-stake areas only yields small diminishing returns? If yes, this might be the point when diet choice starts to be the next most important moral decision.
Or maybe that's the wrong model... maybe life is a constant struggle against our inner wolves, where each day we spend all our effort to get the high-impact decisions right, never having the leisure to think about such inconsequential things as food choices?
Or maybe that's too simplistic... and we instead live in a complex world, where every day presents moral dilemmas that we have not encountered before. A world where there is always more work to do, always new moral mistakes to avoid, and every day has opportunities far greater than cooking a vegan meal.
I guess I was implicitly thinking of something a bit like your first model, except that the monthly transfer is never quite as generous as it *could* be, and so a bit more effort could be productively used towards boosting that higher.
But that model could be wrong. In particular, it could be that at a certain point one just isn't open to accepting further financial costs, and so then dietary improvements might be the next most important change (that one is open to making)...
Neat post! It flirts with -- but doesn't quite cross over into -- what I call "The-Most-You-Can-Do Sweet Spot" reasoning. On this reasoning, if you tried any harder to do the right thing, you'd actually end up doing worse, because you'd exhaust yourself or lose your inspiration or something. So if the idea is "I've only got so much effort to give, so I'm going to give it to the most effective things, rather than giving it to less effective things" -- as though your total moral effort were a fixed sum, you'd be doing reasoning of this sort. Thoughts about this issue, in relation to your post?
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/4569/chapter/203905/The-Happy-Coincidence-Defense-and-The-Most-You-Can
Yeah, it overlaps in sharing the commitment to effectiveness, but diverges in that I'm not positing any "happy coincidence": *of course* I could do better than I currently do! Still, at whatever level of moral effort one is willing to expend, better to use those efforts optimally.
So there's no attempt here to justify the bad action: I agree it's unjustified, and it would be better to try harder. But we're all so *thoroughly* morally imperfect that even those extra efforts could probably be used more productively than on remedying the original wrong we began with.
So in that sense, very different vibes from the self-congratulatory "sweet spot" reasoning that you (rightly) criticize.
Right -- makes sense! There's some kind of efficiency of badness in the background maybe -- an efficient tradeoff between moral badness and self-interest.
Two questions about how this approach may be implemented, pertaining to the *ease of doing the alternative* and the *frequency one might fail to do what they're unjustified in doing*.
1) Imagine two scenarios. First, I'm at a restaurant that has both a clearly labeled vegan menu and a clearly labeled non-vegan menu. Assume for the sake of simplicity that the counterpart items (meat burger, plant burger) are equally priced and equally nutritionally (d)efficient. Second, I'm at a restaurant that only has a clearly labeled non-vegan menu.
Granting the thoughts that purchasing meat is comparatively less bad than, say, failing to donate to an efficient charity (since convincing someone to donate to an efficient animal charity is "even better" than convincing them to eat plant-basedly) and that purchasing meat is something we need not feel so bad about, I do have a sense that I should feel worse for ordering a meat burger in the first scenario than in the second.
And I have this sense even if we stipulate that I am a person for whom becoming vegan would be psychologically difficult (say, because it disrupts certain cultural practices of mine) or difficult with respect to my time ( because I have to learn to cook new foods), etc. (I include this bit in an attempt to handle the *low-hanging-fruit* post you link at the end of section 2 here.)
Q: Does the approach suggested here yield different verdicts about ordering the meat burger in these two cases?
2) Q: If we grant that *for each instance* of purchasing meat, an agent need not feel so bad about it (we can stipulate that they do donate to effective charities and things of that sort), might they just always purchase meat and try to write that off using this approach?
This might just be an expected result, given the admission here that we "should be vegan" but we needn't feel so bad about not being vegan. But something feels off (to me) with the idea of a person *abusing* this approach.
Thanks Richard!
Interesting questions!
I'm not sure about the first one. My initial inclination is to think that, to minimize situational moral luck, our moral self-conception should be more based on our dispositions than on the particular acts we end up performing. If you wouldn't pick a vegan option even if it were available, that's enough to establish that you possess the minor moral flaw in question. Being in a situation where it isn't even available doesn't make you a better person, after all.
On your second question, I think we just need to separate out a bunch of different dietary dispositions:
* Making no moral effort whatsoever in relation to one's consumer choices
* Picking the lowest-hanging fruit in relation to ethical consumption (avoiding chicken, etc.)
* Various levels of greater effort with greater moral payoff...
* Committing to minimizing harm in each instance.
Then the question is just, for each of these levels of increasing ethicality, (i) how much effort would it take to reach (and stick to) this level? and (ii) how much good would this achieve (compared to other uses of that same moral effort)?
I'm not sure I understand what effort you are referring to. I generally find that being vegan is less effort than not being. Afterall, it is literally ‘not doing a thing’. For example, it is common for restaurant menus to have very easily identifiable labels of what is vegan. There are fewer options, which means less reading to do (less effort). In some cases, there is only a single vegan option, reducing my effort to almost nothing. While it can take my friends up to ten minutes to decide what to order, my job is done in the three seconds that it takes me to find the single green leaf symbol on the menu. I don’t even have to read what it is.
Or by effort do you mean overcoming the willpower to eat certain foods that you enjoy? I derive very little enjoyment from eating food (an extraordinarily convenient trait) and perhaps that makes it hard for me to understand. But I still don’t see how that effort conflicts with your ability to do other ethical things.
I am a very big proponent of the idea that your consumption choices do not need to be ‘all or nothing’. Often choosing vegan without being a full-on vegan is far better than the consumption habits of most people. Would you at least say that there is no justifiable reason to not chose vegan options any time that doing so is of equal or less effort than eating animals?
People vary: I'm certainly not claiming that *everyone* finds it difficult to commit to veganism. But many clearly do. (Just as many find it hard not to eat junk food.)
I wouldn't necessary say that the effort "conflicts" with doing other good things. It's presumably always possible to do more. My thought was just that, whatever effort one puts towards mentally committing oneself to veganism, *that very effort* could more fruitfully be put towards committing oneself to donating more. (But that is psychological speculation on my part. Perhaps some people have cause-specific willpower deposits, such that effort spent on improving your diet for some reason *couldn't* have been put towards other ends. I'm not sure why that would be. Just flagging it as a logical possibility that I'm assuming is typically not the case.)
And yes, absolutely agree that there's no reason to put extra effort into doing the morally worse thing if you could more easily do the better thing. (Maybe there are special cases where eating meat is the better thing, e.g. in the rare cases that it promotes *happy* animal lives that would otherwise not exist at all.)
Thanks Richard. Isn't your argument much less persuasive if it doesn't even seem to persuade you? It seems odd and also ineffective to deliberately and needlessly fund and support a system that you know is an abomination while simultaneously working to end it? Just as it would be for intra-human justice causes. Systemic change is deeply important but if we only focus on that I fear we'll abandon personal ethics completely (e.g. is being racist/sexist/homophobic/transphobic/slave-owning/abusive/violent really OK as long as we're combatting these things at a "systemic" level?!?!). That approach, while itself unethical, also perpetuates the bad systems - which comprise individual decisions. Us humans are desperate for excuses not to change. I fear you've just provided another - for yourself and everyone else (the system) too?
I'm not saying any of it is OK. Just that it's better to prioritize one's moral self-improvements in whatever ways will actually do the most good. Which could well recommend supporting justice-oriented organizations *before* one tries to rid oneself of all unjust personal attitudes, dispositions, and behaviors.
I get that you're not saying it's OK. That's the core problem - that you know it's an abomination and yet you decide not to make a fairly easy personal change. Others see that you, a brilliant, thoughtful, caring person - take this path. And they're likely to follow your example.
This isn't a scarcity choice between a) supporting justice-oriented organisations or b) acting more justly. There's a more consistent, coherent option of: c) doing both because they reinforce each other. It's practically pretty easy and psychologically freeing!
I know focusing on the wrongness of something considered "normal" is difficult so maybe there's another better framing - the opportunity you have in making easy yet radical personal changes and talking openly about them. The positive ripples you could send by committing to conceptually and practically (as far as you reasonably can) rejecting intra-human discriminations/needless violence/abuse/animal exploitation & harm & killing etc. would be powerful. As a compassionate, thoughtful person you have serious influence on those who read your work. Those ripples will not only drive important personal changes but systemic ones too. Everyone's a winner - and you'll feel better in yourself too!
I think it's unlikely that anyone *would* have become a vegan but for my writing this. But I'm hopeful that, via the example of this post, some non-vegans may be encouraged to donate to effective animal charities when they otherwise wouldn't have!
It's hard to know and I hope you're right. But I do fear writing this may turn some away from veganism. It's a pattern I've seen in many others. Your audience are likely too curious to deny or ignore or avoid the topic, too compassionate and logical to arbitrarily exclude non-humans from moral consideration and too intellectually rigorous to warp the definitions of words like "humane" or "compassionate". But you risk showing them another option - accepting cognitive dissonance instead of working to resolve it - and accepting akrasia.
I also fear that if modelling akrasia shows people a path away from veganism it may also show them a path away from donating to effective animal charities. If a clear stance against an ethical abomination doesn't impact our personal choices re: consumption decisions and the resulting social signalling opportunity - why should it impact our personal choices re: activism?
If we really can't overcome our akrasia maybe the best approach in public is to focus on the clarity and power of our ethics rather than on our decision not to act on them?
And in a desperate attempt to balance what might seem like a whiny tone (so hard to avoid when considering ethical abominations!)... think of the opportunity of publicly making this pretty easy practical switch. The ripples of influence you and your readers generate as a result might even surpass the benefits of your much appreciated compassionate donations! :)
Perhaps I'm missing the nuance of your post, but nonetheless I'll ask: why not do both? I.e donate effectively and don't eat animals.
I'm not convinced one can only donate effectively or go vegan, nor am I convinced that these trade off substantially against each other. Assuming you are trying to do as much good as possible, why risk potentially increasing demand for meat and causing the death of an animal(s) when you can not?
The phrasing of "personal consumption decisions have got to be way down the list of priorities" makes it sound as though one has to work from top to bottom. Each time you choose your lunch though you're already down that part of the list deciding whether or not to eat an animal. You are making the decision.
You can always ask "why not do a better thing?" (e.g. however much you donate, "Why not donate more?"), and in a sense the obvious answer is to agree that yes, the better thing would be better. Still, none of us are morally perfect so we're none of us always going to actually *do* the better thing on every possible occasion. We all inevitably make moral compromises.
My suggestion is just that compromising on diet isn't such a big deal, and is positively better than compromising on the extent (or effectiveness) of one's donations. So insofar as one is willing to accept some further personal cost, or make some further moral effort to do better, I would generally urge prioritizing more and better donations as a higher priority than optimizing one's personal consumption.
The exception, of course, is when someone would find it *very easy* to go vegan. But people vary. For anyone for whom it would take a significant deliberate effort, I think that effort could be better used elsewhere.
Thank you for taking the time to reply! That's kind of you.
Zvi once quipped about "deontological vegans" in the EA space. I sometimes wonder if I've become one.
"You can always ask "why not do a better thing?" "
I'll bite the bullet and say yes, this is effectively what I'm asking. I don't think asking that you not eat animals is akin to asking moral perfection of you. If you care sufficiently about animals (and I don't doubt that you do) such that you'll donate your own wealth to help them, why not also stop eating them as well? Surely you can manage both.
I think the crux is that I believe compromising on diet is a big deal and (over a lifetime) will result in more animals needlessly dying. I probably think the bar to going vegan is much lower than you do and so don't see it as realistically trading off against donating.
I hope my response doesn't come across as hostile. I enjoy your writings and enjoyed your conversation with Walter Veit.
(e.g. donating a substantial portion of my income, pursuing intellectually honest inquiry into important questions, and maintaining a generally forthright and co-operative disposition towards others)
Not sure this is as valorous as it sounds:
1) donating income is worthless and only makes you less capable of doing what is necessary. Instead, donate your time, not to vain projects like habitat for humanity, but instead in ways that redistribute risk. In your case, this would mean raising and directing capital, NOT giving away a portion of yours (which offsets tax burden further destabilizing society.
2) Honest inquiry directed at important questions...honest and important according to whom? Yourself I suppose. Not that you are in any way intentionally dishonest, but the activity in itself doesnt scale and is easily manipulated by those without your capacity. Instead, seek out the worst in the world and engage them seriously and extensively, which at times may include addressing unimportant and using manipulative, dishonest tactics, which we all use in one form or another and should acknowledge more regularly.
3) Forthrightness and cooperation are very important BUT it depends on the reason. Are you being forthright to get out of an annoying conversation, or to make progress more effectively? Cooperation is also difficult to asses. Are you finding compromises towards a mutual goal, or acting as a self inflated thought leader? Instead, really get into it with people. Its good to disagree and argue AS LONG AS you maintain the conversation. Leaving because someone wont capitulate accomplishes nothing but justify other dismissive action.
Again, I'm not accusing you of any of these, just pointing as that as principles, they are not as clear cut or productive as they may sound on the surface.