May 23, 2023·edited May 23, 2023Liked by Richard Y Chappell
Thanks for the comments on chicken. I sometimes eat chicken, which I justified by loose appeal to some sort of cognitive hierarchy. I hadn't considered (and didn't know) that broiler chickens actually have it much worse than cattle.
Incidentally, this reminds me of Scott Alexander's post about moral offsetting- the idea that (e.g.) $70 donated to PETA undoes the entire lifetime of animal harm caused by a carnivore. I'm not sure what I think about it. At a micro level it makes sense (with the obvious caveat that it's better to do the offset without eating the meat.) But on a macro-level it fails a sort of categorical imperative- if everyone offset their own meat consumption, there would be no meat consumption.
I'm not sure if anyone else listens to Tyler Cowen's podcast but he just did an interview with Singer, where he cited our gracious blog host as an underrated philosopher worth paying attention to! You're hitting the big time!
One objection to Kagan's view comes from Dustin Crummett. The idea is that what matters to one's well-being is how nearby the possible world is where they are a person. But if this were true, then if one created a button that would turn all animals into people if pressed, and then destroyed it before pressing it, this would make factory farming vastly worse, because it would make the possible world where they are persons much more nearby. This is clearly wrong.
I expect Kagan would deny that animals are possibly persons. A magic button could not turn an animal into a person; it could, at most, *replace* an animal with a (numerically distinct) person.
Though I'm not sure what theory of personal identity could deliver that result without equally implying that severely cognitively disabled humans likewise could not possibly become persons (without losing their numerical identity). One can imagine a process *gradually* expanding the pig's cognitive capacities, after all...
But I think what a Kaganesque account needs (I can't remember whether Kagan himself appreciates this or not) is that the relevant possibility be already *intrinsic* to the individual. Human DNA already contains the relevant potential for personhood, whereas pig DNA does not: it requires extrinsic intervention to *change the kind of being* that the individual is. Compare this old guest post from Charles Johnson:
This implies, oddly, that if there was a mental disability that made it so that one could not be made non-cognitively disabled without having their DNA changed, they would matter much less than other mentally disabled people. I also agree that there is no plausible theory of personal identity like that. Finally, Kagan's view would imply that if there was a button that would turn mentally disabled people into persons if pressed, that was never pressed, then that would make mistreating them much worse, because they were closer in modal space to persons.
I don't think Speciesm is very relevant in factory farming discussions. I'm not a utilitarian at all and am quite proudly speciest, I think humans should get materially more moral weight than chickens; yet it is still obviously a moral harm how we treat chickens and other factory farmed animals; (which as you note is the vast vast majority of animal products). It seems intuitive to think one should avoid these moral hazards, including by going vegan, even if one thinks our moral duties are materially stronger to humans (and different in kind) than to other animals.
Hey, Dr. Chappell! Great review, I myself cannot wait to read this book. I was initially ambivalent about purchasing it as I have read the original, but once I saw that Singer considers it a new book, I did order a copy. I am especially pleased to hear that he addresses challenges from Kagan; I myself am not convinced by accounts that want us to take into account that a being could have been a person under different circumstances (you appear to allude to this with the Chicken-Person-Pill Example). Perhaps it is a difference in intuitions, but I think that when you look at the way things actually are, assuming that the benefits conferred by the pill would be the same, there would be no wrong choice here. This, of course, does not make any reference to second or third term items (how would others feel about you giving the pill to the chicken, would the human have more wellbeing over time in light of the intelligence granted by the pill than the chicken would, etc.) that may turn things in favor of the human.
The deprivation account just doesn't seem to work; in either case, giving the hen or the human the pill creates a fundamentally new person, it's just a matter of which being gets to "host" the person, so to speak.
One final note might be that I would still encourage individuals to take it upon themselves to be vegan or vegetarian, even if animal welfare legislation is more effective on its own. I think there are some important things within those choices that do count, even if for much less.
>> "One final note might be that I would still encourage individuals to take it upon themselves to be vegan or vegetarian, even if animal welfare legislation is more effective on its own. I think there are some important things within those choices that do count, even if for much less."
As a vegetarian (and aspiring to eat less eggs/milk/cheese (and doing pretty well on all but the last one)) I think a point that sometimes gets missed when people contrast "systemic change" like legislation vs. individual action is that the two aren't really distinct--any systemic change that actually accomplishes something has to do so by changing peoples' individual actions. Like, banning factory farming will make meat more expensive, and so people will have to eat less meat...so you might as well acclimatize yourself to that world by eating less meat now.
And systemic change is achieved by...a bunch of individuals committing themselves to some project that they likely have minimal individual influence over. Unless you are a member of Congress, or whatever, your decision to campaign for legislation to end factory farming, or your attempts to convince your friends to support candidates who endorse such legislation are subject to all the same criticisms as your decision to give up meat, or to convince your friends to become vegans.
The effort to pass legislation will almost certainly require individual effort in pursuit of building a mass coalition; but once you have a mass coalition aimed at reducing animal suffering you also have a mass coalition whose adoption of veganism might actually be meaningful. Of course, it requires many fewer people to influence legislation, so all else equal your efforts are better spent convincing your friends to support animal-rights candidates than to become vegans; but of course these two campaigns are complementary. Convincing people to vote for animal rights is already doing a lot of the work of convincing them to consider vegetarianism, or at least, to significantly cut back on their meat consumption.
And becoming a vegetarian is a way to advertise your commitment to the cause--to show that this isn't hypocrisy or signaling; that you are willing to make sacrifices--and that the sacrifices you are asking of others aren't unendurable.
In short: I think there is a strong argument that individuals taking it upon themselves to individually commit to eating less meat is part of a strategy for building the support to pass effective legislation.
The way I try to think about this is, don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion. I don’t think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it’s meaningless.
But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change. Sometimes I’ll see people cut what individuals do and what happens in politics. But I think that’s a cut that you need to be very careful making.
It is very hard to impose through politics outcomes and social mores that individuals do not already believe in their private lives. You can do it sometimes. I mean, we’ve had times like, say, Brown v. Board, where that has to happen. But it’s a very difficult way of going about it.
And oftentimes the way politics changes is that enough individuals have changed — and I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change. Oftentimes enough individuals have changed that they are now open to the idea that the policy regime will move into accordance with their values. But if you’re someone who, say, loves eating meat, the idea that the government is going to come tomorrow and tell you you can’t is just not going to fly.
So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals, that’s not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it’s not just individual. All of the stuff catches. And it is why I’m a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.
That all sounds right! I certainly don't mean to minimize the value of going vegan -- I think that's very praiseworthy, and worth encouraging.
On the flip side, I tend to think we should be sparing with blame, and so don't really like the idea of blaming individual consumers for bad decisions (though this could be partly self-serving bias!); whereas I'm *much* more inclined to think that those who oppose political reforms to improve animal welfare are blameworthy for this. In a similar vein (though this time less self-servingly!), I think opposing effective foreign aid would be much worse than merely failing to give to charity.
Weakness of will seems like an understandable sort of excuse for failing to change personal habits -- it's a hard thing to do! -- whereas actually *voting* for a worse outcome seems more like an outright endorsement of the bad thing.
Yeah, I didn't take you to be minimizing it; to be clear my comment was just a thought inspired by the discussion of individual consumption vs. collective action, not really a response to what you were saying.
And also very much agree with your follow-up; I didn't discuss the one downside of the strategy above, which is that personalizing a political issue can make people feel judged or guilty, which I absolutely agree is not something you want. I think the ideal is to model vegetarianism/veganism/cutting back on animal products as a reasonable, achievable goal, without sanctimony or judgement so that people feel welcome to try it out to some degree, rather than feel judged for their failure to commit all the way. I think trying to change peoples' individual habits should be done in a more inclusive, less strident way--that's probably still true of political change, but I think a little more exclusivity and high-toned moral language is okay at that level.
I think the logic applies to almost any moral decision with an individual-vs-collective-action dimension; I'm not sure what moral theory there is that says that there should be concerted political action to make people eat more meat, but to the extent you believe so, you probably should think of changing individual minds as part of that.
Ah, I just read your comment below that clarifies this. I think the point is not so much "think of yourself as a high-status individual whose example will convince others to follow" but rather to preemptively respond to comments like that of praxis below; it's easier to convince people that a cause is serious if it looks like you take it seriously.
It may still be that the above is outweighed by second-order "would people want to belong to a political movement with me as a member?"-type calculations but I'm usually skeptical of this type of double-bankshot style of reasoning.
You understand the arguments, you can access the facts. You live in the richest country in the history of the world. Top university educated, trained in philosophy and critical thinking. Employed as an associate professor at an american university which puts you in a location and income bracket where buying vegan food poses no problem. Emeshed in philosophy and EA circles where you presenting as vegan would come at no serious social cost. You even personally know Peter Singer!
You call what humans do to animals "abusive", "harrowing", "abominable", "heartbreaking", "evil" and "the gravest ongoing moral disaster of our times".
You appear to every single day have the best possible opportunities to easily avoid supporting those immense harms. Yet you choose to support them for seemingly no other reason than your own pleasure satisfaction and you publicly, shamelessly, matter-of-factly admit doing so.
Have you watched undercover videos from animal industries, transportations trucks and slaughterhouses? Do that and say to yourself "I am paying for this, I'm helping this harm be done, that animal is suffering because of me". Why isn't such reflection sufficient to make you change your behaviour? What exactly is preventing you from, starting right now, buying and eating only vegan food going forward? What is so special about your motivational system that you cannot do what millions of already vegan people do every day, despite being in worse social and economic situations than you? What can you say to us to justify why you refuse to take the steps that we have already taken?
You write "I tend to think we should be sparing with blame" but your own critiques on this blog against others often come across as scathing and blameful. You recently even created meme images to ridicule vegans and animal activists who wrote a book that criticized the EA movement for not prioritizing veganism and direct animal care work enough! If that was a fitting reaction to them then what is a fitting reaction to you engaging in "the gravest ongoing moral disaster of our times" for personal pleasure?
In revealed practice your values seem to be: you blaming others, even other vegans, for acting and thinking suboptimally is good and fine but blaming you for daily, very easily avoidable harms to animals is inappropriate.
Even worse, by shamelessly admitting your knowing participation in those harms you send a practical signal to all readers which is louder than all your other words: harming animals is really not a serious issue! For how could it be, if someone as privileged as you, someone who has dedicated their life to thinking and writing about morality, won't even take basic, everyday steps to withdraw practical support of those harm?
The short answer is that the marginal impact of my going vegan doesn't seem a good use of effort. Being vegan is generally good, but being 75% of the way there is already 75% as good. And for less effort than the final hurdle, I could just increase my donations a bit more, and that would be vastly more impactful. (I've already donated thousands of dollars to effective animal charities -- which makes vastly more of a difference than one reducitarian switching to vegan -- and tens of thousands more to other good causes, so I'm already confident that my net contribution to the world is unusually positive.)
A secondary consideration is that I'm actually not confident that veganism would be better for animals than my current diet. I'm generally pretty careful about what I buy, and so expect that the animal lives my purchases support are positive on net. I think "conscientious omnivorism", when feasible, is actually better than veganism. But I hesitate to promote that too prominently, since there's a risk of people moving from "eating animal products is OK in principle" to "therefore I don't need to be careful about which animal products I purchase."
> "In revealed practice your values seem to be: you blaming others, even other vegans, for acting and thinking suboptimally is good and fine but blaming you for daily, very easily avoidable harms to animals is inappropriate."
Not at all; like I said, I don't think it's generally appropriate to blame people for failing to give more to charity. Most people give vastly less than I do, but I try not to blame them for it -- I'd prefer to encourage them to consider giving more.
Where I think blame (or scathing criticism) is more appropriate is in political actions that risk being immensely net-negative: whether the politician decrying animal welfare legislation for making burgers more expensive, or the critics of EA discouraging large audiences from making effective donations. I don't think being vegan is so special that it gives one a free pass on doing massively net-harmful things like promoting sloppy anti-EA rhetoric.
Part of my underlying thought here is that blame (from strangers on the internet) can discourage public expressions, but is unlikely to change private behaviour. Discouraging public expressions of sloppy harmful rhetoric would actually achieve something. Discouraging public expressions of one's private consumer behaviour (without changing the underlying behaviour), by contrast, does not.
> Even worse, by shamelessly admitting your knowing participation in those harms you send a practical signal to all readers which is louder than all your other words: harming animals is really not a serious issue!
I disagree. The vast super-majority of people are not vegan. I don't think you'll win them over with holier-than-thou rhetoric. By disclosing that I make some of the same non-ideal decisions that they do, but nonetheless support the cause of animal welfare in a range of pragmatic, non-threatening ways, I invite them to do likewise. That could easily end up doing more good than exclusively (and, for most people, unconvincingly) promoting veganism.
I call BS on your "effort" reply. How much extra effort would it really take for you day to day? Donating to charities that work to end animal exploitation, not humanewash continued exploitation, is great but you can both eat vegan food and donate money, one doesn't prevent the other. Such donations also doesn't remove or justify the personal moral wrongdoing in paying to use or consume the body of a victim of unjust exploitation. In human-human cases we don't let abusers cop out with "but I donated a lot to effective charities!" and given antispeciesism neither should we in human-animal cases.
The "but I donated so my personal abusive/unjust/harmful actions are irrelevant" mentality is toxic for an EA movement where "astronomical waste" thinking is widespread. I worry that SBF (megadonor!) and the sexual exploits cases are just the beginning. When you see yourself as saving a universe of long term maximal bliss from the void then puny earth-scale norms against abusing existing individuals will more likely feel irrelevant and not worth the effort. If much of your donations have gone to alignment efforts shaped by the astronomical waste agenda then I fear that you are doing net harm.
In your secondary consideration "the animal lives my purchases support" translates to "the animals bred into captivity to have their lives cut short in order to please my palate". That's unjust and wrong. It is also speciesist because you do not and wouldn't push for a policy to breed humans into captivity for lethal medical experiments or other lethal exploitation after some months of pleasant existence.
Another comment by JerL gave good reasons to reject the personal/political binary implied in your claims about blame and I view your hasty, ridiculing dismissals of recent EA critiques as another symptom of the problems described earlier. You mention that most people aren't vegan but the total utilitarian views implicit in your reply are held by much fewer people than the number of vegans in the world or the number of people attracted to the basic idea of antispeciesism.
You're assuming deontological norms that I reject. It's not surprising that we'd disagree. I discussed farming humans in the OP. I don't think it's "speciesist" in any objectionable sense to apply different moral rules in our treatment of different species, when those are the rules that would best promote overall well-being.
> You're assuming deontological norms that I reject. It's not surprising that we'd disagree.
That is only part of it. You are ghosting on the BS effort claims, the risk of toxic effects in the EA movement from belief in your view and problems with your approach to feminist and vegan critics of current EA practice.
> I don't think it's "speciesist" in any objectionable sense to apply different moral rules in our treatment of different species, when those are the rules that would best promote overall well-being.
In the same way you also wouldn't find it "sexist" in any objectionable sense to enslave women, if that would best promote overall well-being. Your view is unjust to its core like that. It should be resisted within EA and I think critical external reporting on EA will increasingly put pressure on it.
You might find that people were more willing to interact with you if you were less rude. Explaining my thoughts to belligerent randos on the internet -- especially when the answers are already contained in what I've previously written -- gives an even worse return-on-effort-invested than changing my diet.
(My general policy, to improve the tone and quality of discussions here, is to ban people I find unpleasant. Any further belligerence from you will cross that line. As Obama said, we can disagree without being disagreeable.)
Fair, I retract "ghosting" and "BS" which I think is what you're reacting to? I could instead have written that you did not reply to my question "How much extra effort would it really take for you day to day?" and the sentences that followed it. I think the rest is very frank but not rude but maybe I'm off there to. I not long ago buried an animal individual that had been a loved member of our family for many years. He had a wonderful personality and interacted socially with us. We in the family felt a closer connection to him than to many other people. It pains me incredibly to read you advocate for beings like him being "farmed" to be killed and consumed. I have the strongest possible moral reaction that your position there is fundamentally unjust. I want to dedicate my money and effort to stop it and will oppose any part of the EA movement that proposes anything like it. The antispeciesism I stand for and the future I want to bring about does not treat sentient animals, human or non-human, as things to kill and consume.
I generally don’t eat pork (when I can recognize as such, which is remarkably hard sometimes) and have been flirting with vegetarianism and even veganism for some time.
I suppose the reason I still eat meat is 1. The animals are already dead 2. Any decrease in demand of meat will ever so slightly drop the price which will ever so slightly increase the demand from some price sensitive proud meat eater.
There is also the none existentance problem, which doesn’t apply to factory farming, (I would much rather not exist then be in a factory farm) but does apply to more traditional or just not horror show levels of farming.
I also tend to think there is a decent chance of suffering only mattering if the animal has some kind of meta cognitive abilities that chickens don’t have but pigs probably do.
Additionally, I think the strongest argument for veganism and vegetarianism is to slowly spread it, but I feel like I’m low status enough that if anything people would be more encouraged to eat meat if they saw me vegan-ing around!
I think that eating meat actually does have significant effects, as I argue here. It's true that it slightly drops the price, but this only reduces the marginal effect of reduced meat consumption by about a quarter, concluded by Norwood and Lusk. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is
Thanks for the comments on chicken. I sometimes eat chicken, which I justified by loose appeal to some sort of cognitive hierarchy. I hadn't considered (and didn't know) that broiler chickens actually have it much worse than cattle.
Incidentally, this reminds me of Scott Alexander's post about moral offsetting- the idea that (e.g.) $70 donated to PETA undoes the entire lifetime of animal harm caused by a carnivore. I'm not sure what I think about it. At a micro level it makes sense (with the obvious caveat that it's better to do the offset without eating the meat.) But on a macro-level it fails a sort of categorical imperative- if everyone offset their own meat consumption, there would be no meat consumption.
I'm not sure if anyone else listens to Tyler Cowen's podcast but he just did an interview with Singer, where he cited our gracious blog host as an underrated philosopher worth paying attention to! You're hitting the big time!
Very flattering! :-)
The whole interview was fantastic, though. Here's the link if anyone's interested: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-singer/
Yeah probably should have mentioned it's an interesting discussion in general, but obviously the most important part was your (deserved) shout out
One objection to Kagan's view comes from Dustin Crummett. The idea is that what matters to one's well-being is how nearby the possible world is where they are a person. But if this were true, then if one created a button that would turn all animals into people if pressed, and then destroyed it before pressing it, this would make factory farming vastly worse, because it would make the possible world where they are persons much more nearby. This is clearly wrong.
I expect Kagan would deny that animals are possibly persons. A magic button could not turn an animal into a person; it could, at most, *replace* an animal with a (numerically distinct) person.
Though I'm not sure what theory of personal identity could deliver that result without equally implying that severely cognitively disabled humans likewise could not possibly become persons (without losing their numerical identity). One can imagine a process *gradually* expanding the pig's cognitive capacities, after all...
But I think what a Kaganesque account needs (I can't remember whether Kagan himself appreciates this or not) is that the relevant possibility be already *intrinsic* to the individual. Human DNA already contains the relevant potential for personhood, whereas pig DNA does not: it requires extrinsic intervention to *change the kind of being* that the individual is. Compare this old guest post from Charles Johnson:
https://www.philosophyetc.net/2005/12/freak-intelligence-marginal-cases-and.html
This implies, oddly, that if there was a mental disability that made it so that one could not be made non-cognitively disabled without having their DNA changed, they would matter much less than other mentally disabled people. I also agree that there is no plausible theory of personal identity like that. Finally, Kagan's view would imply that if there was a button that would turn mentally disabled people into persons if pressed, that was never pressed, then that would make mistreating them much worse, because they were closer in modal space to persons.
Basically: avoiding factory farming seems overwhelming predetermined regardless of ones moral framework.
Yes, that's something I tried to emphasize in the OP!
I don't think Speciesm is very relevant in factory farming discussions. I'm not a utilitarian at all and am quite proudly speciest, I think humans should get materially more moral weight than chickens; yet it is still obviously a moral harm how we treat chickens and other factory farmed animals; (which as you note is the vast vast majority of animal products). It seems intuitive to think one should avoid these moral hazards, including by going vegan, even if one thinks our moral duties are materially stronger to humans (and different in kind) than to other animals.
Hey, Dr. Chappell! Great review, I myself cannot wait to read this book. I was initially ambivalent about purchasing it as I have read the original, but once I saw that Singer considers it a new book, I did order a copy. I am especially pleased to hear that he addresses challenges from Kagan; I myself am not convinced by accounts that want us to take into account that a being could have been a person under different circumstances (you appear to allude to this with the Chicken-Person-Pill Example). Perhaps it is a difference in intuitions, but I think that when you look at the way things actually are, assuming that the benefits conferred by the pill would be the same, there would be no wrong choice here. This, of course, does not make any reference to second or third term items (how would others feel about you giving the pill to the chicken, would the human have more wellbeing over time in light of the intelligence granted by the pill than the chicken would, etc.) that may turn things in favor of the human.
The deprivation account just doesn't seem to work; in either case, giving the hen or the human the pill creates a fundamentally new person, it's just a matter of which being gets to "host" the person, so to speak.
One final note might be that I would still encourage individuals to take it upon themselves to be vegan or vegetarian, even if animal welfare legislation is more effective on its own. I think there are some important things within those choices that do count, even if for much less.
>> "One final note might be that I would still encourage individuals to take it upon themselves to be vegan or vegetarian, even if animal welfare legislation is more effective on its own. I think there are some important things within those choices that do count, even if for much less."
As a vegetarian (and aspiring to eat less eggs/milk/cheese (and doing pretty well on all but the last one)) I think a point that sometimes gets missed when people contrast "systemic change" like legislation vs. individual action is that the two aren't really distinct--any systemic change that actually accomplishes something has to do so by changing peoples' individual actions. Like, banning factory farming will make meat more expensive, and so people will have to eat less meat...so you might as well acclimatize yourself to that world by eating less meat now.
And systemic change is achieved by...a bunch of individuals committing themselves to some project that they likely have minimal individual influence over. Unless you are a member of Congress, or whatever, your decision to campaign for legislation to end factory farming, or your attempts to convince your friends to support candidates who endorse such legislation are subject to all the same criticisms as your decision to give up meat, or to convince your friends to become vegans.
The effort to pass legislation will almost certainly require individual effort in pursuit of building a mass coalition; but once you have a mass coalition aimed at reducing animal suffering you also have a mass coalition whose adoption of veganism might actually be meaningful. Of course, it requires many fewer people to influence legislation, so all else equal your efforts are better spent convincing your friends to support animal-rights candidates than to become vegans; but of course these two campaigns are complementary. Convincing people to vote for animal rights is already doing a lot of the work of convincing them to consider vegetarianism, or at least, to significantly cut back on their meat consumption.
And becoming a vegetarian is a way to advertise your commitment to the cause--to show that this isn't hypocrisy or signaling; that you are willing to make sacrifices--and that the sacrifices you are asking of others aren't unendurable.
In short: I think there is a strong argument that individuals taking it upon themselves to individually commit to eating less meat is part of a strategy for building the support to pass effective legislation.
Actually, here's (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-ask-me-anything.html) Ezra Klein saying it better than me:
The way I try to think about this is, don’t think about consumption — even your consumption — as individual. Think of yourself as a node for social, political and moral contagion. I don’t think my personal decision to not eat meat is that important. On the scale of the global animal trade, it’s meaningless.
But I caught my veganism from my wife. Other people have caught veganism or vegetarianism from me. And it’s in that way that individual attitudes ladder up to social attitudes, and then to social and political change. Sometimes I’ll see people cut what individuals do and what happens in politics. But I think that’s a cut that you need to be very careful making.
It is very hard to impose through politics outcomes and social mores that individuals do not already believe in their private lives. You can do it sometimes. I mean, we’ve had times like, say, Brown v. Board, where that has to happen. But it’s a very difficult way of going about it.
And oftentimes the way politics changes is that enough individuals have changed — and I think this is true also for civil rights and a lot of the examples of what sometimes get looked at as legislative or legal change. Oftentimes enough individuals have changed that they are now open to the idea that the policy regime will move into accordance with their values. But if you’re someone who, say, loves eating meat, the idea that the government is going to come tomorrow and tell you you can’t is just not going to fly.
So taking seriously the ideas and morals and views of individuals, that’s not a different sphere than what ends up happening in politics. And it’s not just individual. All of the stuff catches. And it is why I’m a fan of people not being quiet about the way they try to instantiate their political ideals in their individual lives. I think that a lot of the value of the choices we make is in our willingness to try to use those to change the choices other people see as normal for them to make.
That all sounds right! I certainly don't mean to minimize the value of going vegan -- I think that's very praiseworthy, and worth encouraging.
On the flip side, I tend to think we should be sparing with blame, and so don't really like the idea of blaming individual consumers for bad decisions (though this could be partly self-serving bias!); whereas I'm *much* more inclined to think that those who oppose political reforms to improve animal welfare are blameworthy for this. In a similar vein (though this time less self-servingly!), I think opposing effective foreign aid would be much worse than merely failing to give to charity.
Weakness of will seems like an understandable sort of excuse for failing to change personal habits -- it's a hard thing to do! -- whereas actually *voting* for a worse outcome seems more like an outright endorsement of the bad thing.
Yeah, I didn't take you to be minimizing it; to be clear my comment was just a thought inspired by the discussion of individual consumption vs. collective action, not really a response to what you were saying.
And also very much agree with your follow-up; I didn't discuss the one downside of the strategy above, which is that personalizing a political issue can make people feel judged or guilty, which I absolutely agree is not something you want. I think the ideal is to model vegetarianism/veganism/cutting back on animal products as a reasonable, achievable goal, without sanctimony or judgement so that people feel welcome to try it out to some degree, rather than feel judged for their failure to commit all the way. I think trying to change peoples' individual habits should be done in a more inclusive, less strident way--that's probably still true of political change, but I think a little more exclusivity and high-toned moral language is okay at that level.
Hmm, applying that logic to me I may have a moral imperative to eat meat!
I think the logic applies to almost any moral decision with an individual-vs-collective-action dimension; I'm not sure what moral theory there is that says that there should be concerted political action to make people eat more meat, but to the extent you believe so, you probably should think of changing individual minds as part of that.
Ah, I just read your comment below that clarifies this. I think the point is not so much "think of yourself as a high-status individual whose example will convince others to follow" but rather to preemptively respond to comments like that of praxis below; it's easier to convince people that a cause is serious if it looks like you take it seriously.
It may still be that the above is outweighed by second-order "would people want to belong to a political movement with me as a member?"-type calculations but I'm usually skeptical of this type of double-bankshot style of reasoning.
Why aren't you vegan?
You understand the arguments, you can access the facts. You live in the richest country in the history of the world. Top university educated, trained in philosophy and critical thinking. Employed as an associate professor at an american university which puts you in a location and income bracket where buying vegan food poses no problem. Emeshed in philosophy and EA circles where you presenting as vegan would come at no serious social cost. You even personally know Peter Singer!
You call what humans do to animals "abusive", "harrowing", "abominable", "heartbreaking", "evil" and "the gravest ongoing moral disaster of our times".
You appear to every single day have the best possible opportunities to easily avoid supporting those immense harms. Yet you choose to support them for seemingly no other reason than your own pleasure satisfaction and you publicly, shamelessly, matter-of-factly admit doing so.
Have you watched undercover videos from animal industries, transportations trucks and slaughterhouses? Do that and say to yourself "I am paying for this, I'm helping this harm be done, that animal is suffering because of me". Why isn't such reflection sufficient to make you change your behaviour? What exactly is preventing you from, starting right now, buying and eating only vegan food going forward? What is so special about your motivational system that you cannot do what millions of already vegan people do every day, despite being in worse social and economic situations than you? What can you say to us to justify why you refuse to take the steps that we have already taken?
You write "I tend to think we should be sparing with blame" but your own critiques on this blog against others often come across as scathing and blameful. You recently even created meme images to ridicule vegans and animal activists who wrote a book that criticized the EA movement for not prioritizing veganism and direct animal care work enough! If that was a fitting reaction to them then what is a fitting reaction to you engaging in "the gravest ongoing moral disaster of our times" for personal pleasure?
In revealed practice your values seem to be: you blaming others, even other vegans, for acting and thinking suboptimally is good and fine but blaming you for daily, very easily avoidable harms to animals is inappropriate.
Even worse, by shamelessly admitting your knowing participation in those harms you send a practical signal to all readers which is louder than all your other words: harming animals is really not a serious issue! For how could it be, if someone as privileged as you, someone who has dedicated their life to thinking and writing about morality, won't even take basic, everyday steps to withdraw practical support of those harm?
The short answer is that the marginal impact of my going vegan doesn't seem a good use of effort. Being vegan is generally good, but being 75% of the way there is already 75% as good. And for less effort than the final hurdle, I could just increase my donations a bit more, and that would be vastly more impactful. (I've already donated thousands of dollars to effective animal charities -- which makes vastly more of a difference than one reducitarian switching to vegan -- and tens of thousands more to other good causes, so I'm already confident that my net contribution to the world is unusually positive.)
A secondary consideration is that I'm actually not confident that veganism would be better for animals than my current diet. I'm generally pretty careful about what I buy, and so expect that the animal lives my purchases support are positive on net. I think "conscientious omnivorism", when feasible, is actually better than veganism. But I hesitate to promote that too prominently, since there's a risk of people moving from "eating animal products is OK in principle" to "therefore I don't need to be careful about which animal products I purchase."
> "In revealed practice your values seem to be: you blaming others, even other vegans, for acting and thinking suboptimally is good and fine but blaming you for daily, very easily avoidable harms to animals is inappropriate."
Not at all; like I said, I don't think it's generally appropriate to blame people for failing to give more to charity. Most people give vastly less than I do, but I try not to blame them for it -- I'd prefer to encourage them to consider giving more.
Where I think blame (or scathing criticism) is more appropriate is in political actions that risk being immensely net-negative: whether the politician decrying animal welfare legislation for making burgers more expensive, or the critics of EA discouraging large audiences from making effective donations. I don't think being vegan is so special that it gives one a free pass on doing massively net-harmful things like promoting sloppy anti-EA rhetoric.
Part of my underlying thought here is that blame (from strangers on the internet) can discourage public expressions, but is unlikely to change private behaviour. Discouraging public expressions of sloppy harmful rhetoric would actually achieve something. Discouraging public expressions of one's private consumer behaviour (without changing the underlying behaviour), by contrast, does not.
> Even worse, by shamelessly admitting your knowing participation in those harms you send a practical signal to all readers which is louder than all your other words: harming animals is really not a serious issue!
I disagree. The vast super-majority of people are not vegan. I don't think you'll win them over with holier-than-thou rhetoric. By disclosing that I make some of the same non-ideal decisions that they do, but nonetheless support the cause of animal welfare in a range of pragmatic, non-threatening ways, I invite them to do likewise. That could easily end up doing more good than exclusively (and, for most people, unconvincingly) promoting veganism.
I call BS on your "effort" reply. How much extra effort would it really take for you day to day? Donating to charities that work to end animal exploitation, not humanewash continued exploitation, is great but you can both eat vegan food and donate money, one doesn't prevent the other. Such donations also doesn't remove or justify the personal moral wrongdoing in paying to use or consume the body of a victim of unjust exploitation. In human-human cases we don't let abusers cop out with "but I donated a lot to effective charities!" and given antispeciesism neither should we in human-animal cases.
The "but I donated so my personal abusive/unjust/harmful actions are irrelevant" mentality is toxic for an EA movement where "astronomical waste" thinking is widespread. I worry that SBF (megadonor!) and the sexual exploits cases are just the beginning. When you see yourself as saving a universe of long term maximal bliss from the void then puny earth-scale norms against abusing existing individuals will more likely feel irrelevant and not worth the effort. If much of your donations have gone to alignment efforts shaped by the astronomical waste agenda then I fear that you are doing net harm.
In your secondary consideration "the animal lives my purchases support" translates to "the animals bred into captivity to have their lives cut short in order to please my palate". That's unjust and wrong. It is also speciesist because you do not and wouldn't push for a policy to breed humans into captivity for lethal medical experiments or other lethal exploitation after some months of pleasant existence.
Another comment by JerL gave good reasons to reject the personal/political binary implied in your claims about blame and I view your hasty, ridiculing dismissals of recent EA critiques as another symptom of the problems described earlier. You mention that most people aren't vegan but the total utilitarian views implicit in your reply are held by much fewer people than the number of vegans in the world or the number of people attracted to the basic idea of antispeciesism.
You're assuming deontological norms that I reject. It's not surprising that we'd disagree. I discussed farming humans in the OP. I don't think it's "speciesist" in any objectionable sense to apply different moral rules in our treatment of different species, when those are the rules that would best promote overall well-being.
> You're assuming deontological norms that I reject. It's not surprising that we'd disagree.
That is only part of it. You are ghosting on the BS effort claims, the risk of toxic effects in the EA movement from belief in your view and problems with your approach to feminist and vegan critics of current EA practice.
> I don't think it's "speciesist" in any objectionable sense to apply different moral rules in our treatment of different species, when those are the rules that would best promote overall well-being.
In the same way you also wouldn't find it "sexist" in any objectionable sense to enslave women, if that would best promote overall well-being. Your view is unjust to its core like that. It should be resisted within EA and I think critical external reporting on EA will increasingly put pressure on it.
You might find that people were more willing to interact with you if you were less rude. Explaining my thoughts to belligerent randos on the internet -- especially when the answers are already contained in what I've previously written -- gives an even worse return-on-effort-invested than changing my diet.
(My general policy, to improve the tone and quality of discussions here, is to ban people I find unpleasant. Any further belligerence from you will cross that line. As Obama said, we can disagree without being disagreeable.)
Fair, I retract "ghosting" and "BS" which I think is what you're reacting to? I could instead have written that you did not reply to my question "How much extra effort would it really take for you day to day?" and the sentences that followed it. I think the rest is very frank but not rude but maybe I'm off there to. I not long ago buried an animal individual that had been a loved member of our family for many years. He had a wonderful personality and interacted socially with us. We in the family felt a closer connection to him than to many other people. It pains me incredibly to read you advocate for beings like him being "farmed" to be killed and consumed. I have the strongest possible moral reaction that your position there is fundamentally unjust. I want to dedicate my money and effort to stop it and will oppose any part of the EA movement that proposes anything like it. The antispeciesism I stand for and the future I want to bring about does not treat sentient animals, human or non-human, as things to kill and consume.
I generally don’t eat pork (when I can recognize as such, which is remarkably hard sometimes) and have been flirting with vegetarianism and even veganism for some time.
I suppose the reason I still eat meat is 1. The animals are already dead 2. Any decrease in demand of meat will ever so slightly drop the price which will ever so slightly increase the demand from some price sensitive proud meat eater.
There is also the none existentance problem, which doesn’t apply to factory farming, (I would much rather not exist then be in a factory farm) but does apply to more traditional or just not horror show levels of farming.
I also tend to think there is a decent chance of suffering only mattering if the animal has some kind of meta cognitive abilities that chickens don’t have but pigs probably do.
Additionally, I think the strongest argument for veganism and vegetarianism is to slowly spread it, but I feel like I’m low status enough that if anything people would be more encouraged to eat meat if they saw me vegan-ing around!
Idk though I haven’t really fully thought it out.
I think that eating meat actually does have significant effects, as I argue here. It's true that it slightly drops the price, but this only reduces the marginal effect of reduced meat consumption by about a quarter, concluded by Norwood and Lusk. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-causal-inefficacy-objection-is