Some thoughts on vegetarianism and veganism

FWIW, I've had similar thoughts: I used to think being veg*n was, in some sense, really morally important and not doing it would be really letting the side down. But, after doing it for a few years, I felt much less certain about it.*

To press though, what seems odd about the "the other things I do are so much more impactful, why should I even worry about this?" line is that it has an awkward whisper of self-importance and that it would license all sorts of other behaviours. 

To draw this out with a slightly silly and not perfect analogy, imagine we hear a story about some medieval king who sometimes, but not always, kicked people and animals that got in his way. When asked by some brave lackey, "m'lord, but why do you kick them; surely there is no need?" The king replies (imagine a booming voice for best effect) "I am very important and do much good work.  Given this, whether I kick or not kick is truly a rounding error, a trifle, on my efforts and I do not propose to pay attention to these consequences".

I think that we might grant that what the king says is true - kicking things is genuinely a very small negative compared to the large positive of his other actions. However, we might still be bothered by two things. First, it's rude for him to remind us how much more important he is than us, even if it's true. Second, the kicking still seems unnecessary, even if it's only small. It's not like it helps him be more impactful with the rest of his life. So perhaps our intuitions on the meat-eating case turn on whether we think it's a serious vs a trivial sacrifice to stop doing it. 

*In fact,  I've been experimenting with a 'welfaretarian' diet (where you only eat animals that have had happy lives) recently and might write something up on that at some point. 

Copying a comment I once wrote:

• eating veg sits somewhere between "avoid intercontinental flights" and "donate to effective charities" in terms of expected impact, and I'm not sure where to draw the line between "altruistic actions that seem way too costly and should be discouraged" and "altruistic actions that seem a reasonable early step in one's EA journey and should be encouraged"

• Intuitively and anecdotally (and based on some likely-crappy papers), it seems harder to see animals as sentient beings or think correctly about the badness of factory farming while eating meat; this form of motivated reasoning plausibly distorts most people's epistemics, and this is about a pretty important part of the world, and recognizing the badness of factory farming has minor implications for s-risks and other AI stuff

I'm quite baffled by the argument that, because giving to charity or changing career can do more good than dietary change, this then means it's permissible or even advisable to avoid dietary change. Relative values are entirely irrelevant. In my opinion the absolute consequentialist value of being ve*an is still considerable, and it is this absolute value that ultimately matters.

Usually we think of saving one human life, or saving one life from severe suffering, to be an incredibly valuable thing to do - and it is. Why shouldn't this be the case for farm animals? Going ve*an will impact far more than just one animal's life anyway - Brian Tomasik estimates that “avoiding eating one chicken or fish roughly translates to one less chicken or fish raised and killed”. It's also worth noting that over 99% of farm animals in the USA live on factory farms.

There are strong consequentialist reasons for going ve*an other than the direct effects on the animals we eat which are well-covered here. One of the most important in my opinion is that you can influence others to change their diet and generally spread concern for animals and expand our moral circle. We need a society that stops seeing animals as objects to reduce the chances of s-risks, where vast amounts of suffering are locked in. How can we care about digital sentience when we don't even care about cows?

A lot of the arguments for this are ones that I would have suggested anyway so I won't speak to that much other than to say that I broadly agree.

Two main things where I think I can add value:

1. Often our decisions aren't mutually exclusive and looking through a single 'impact' lens can be a bit myopic and counterproductive. Most of the time going veg*n has virtually zero negative tradeoff with other impact decisions for me, it doesn't make it harder to work on important issues nor does it get in the way of donations. Most of the time there are 'buckets' of resources/decisions that we have that don't trade off against each other. Where externalities exist with eating animals for me they have mostly been positive (e.g. commitment, compassion, authenticity, credibility etc etc). This differs from person to person. For example, I've drawn the line at being  something in between a vegan and vegetarian diet (and have allowed for the occasional bivalve). This is similar to donations, sure, someone could have a huge impact (in expectation) if they do some form of direct work, but even after they spend on increasing their own impact they'll probably have budget to do a heck of a lot of good via donating.
2. On the health effects: I understand this hesitation (I felt it too) but in most cases this is a nonstarter. I'm incredibly fit and active and that hasn't changed since changing my diet. The same goes for many regular folk right through to professional athletes. The only caveat is that I might recommend creatine and/or vitamin B depending on your lifestyle/body. It would surprise me a lot if you'd even notice much (I'm not sure about how you currently eat/cook etc though to understand how much you'd need to learn to adapt your diet healthily). I've noticed more people get healthier from changing their diet than the other way around.

Personally, I've found it to be a positive change in my life for many reasons (impact, motivation, and otherwise) and think it's a good thing for our community that we're overrepresented by people taking the wellbeing of others seriously enough to make a relatively minor lifestyle change that has a fairly direct and positive impact. If I were to imagine the reverse (that EA had a lower than average population of people on a veg*n diet) then I'd find it hard to promote our community/ideas because I'd find it hard to expect outsiders to take us seriously (and I'd find it hard to take us seriously too).

An important consideration that seems missing here is the increased search cost for other people trying to provide food for you, and the increased complexity of trying to coordinate on food for a large group of people, given a much more limited dietary range. 

In my experience, organizing events for EAs is easily 25% more difficult than organizing it for any other group I've organized events for, just due to the wide range of dietary preferences that is represented by people, and the reliable problems that show up if you try to somehow make vegan catering work . These problems have probably been around 30% of the stress that I've experienced in organizing events over the past 7 years, and I've consistently seen other organizers spend a substantial chunk of their organizing time trying to solve catering problems that I don't really think are a problem for most other communities.

In my personal life, I've also found it quite difficult to spontaneously decide to eat out, while still reliable filling dietary preferences, especially if the diet is further restricted by some food allergies, so the amount of eating out I've done with EAs is also a good bit lower because of the high prevalence of various dietary preferences. 

These tradeoffs might be worth it (though I am not currently particularly sold), but it's a tradeoff that I've rarely seen acknowledged, and that has made me sad (as someone who has spent a substantial chunk of the last 8 years of their life organizing EA events).

If you think the signalling benefits from being veg*n are large, then it seems plausible to me that the signalling benefits from being a "scope-sensitive" or "evidence-sensitive" veg*n are larger, at least depending on your background culture and how high-bandwidth of a message you can send.

My family didn't ask any questions when I became vegetarian (lots of their friends are vegetarian), but the fact that I still eat oysters causes no end of questions. This leads to conversations about different types of animal sentience that feel more like they're actually about our treatment of animals than would have happened if I were a "normal" vegetarian.

I've had less opportunity to see the effects firsthand, but I think being averse to foods in rough proportion to their suffering per calorie, e.g. eating beef but avoiding eggs (and talking about why you do this, when asked) might have a similar result.

[This isn't to argue that the signalling benefits outweigh the direct harm.]

Psychological/epistemic consequences seem like another potentially big part of this choice that isn't discussed often (e.g., I haven't checked it, but this Wikipedia article summarizes experiments which seem to suggest that eating meat changes people's ethical and empirical beliefs about animals).

I think the arguments that most animal products are bad at all in expectation to consume based on short term effects are weak, given the very uncertain effects on wild animals. Abstaining from some may mean replacing support for an active moral atrocity with a moral atrocity by omission (wild animal suffering).

The arguments are strongest (even if not very persuasive, as you note) against consuming chicken meat and eggs, farmed insects and maybe herbivorous farmed aquatic animals (other than bivalves), because of the higher density of direct suffering relative to externalities compared to other animal products.

So, if you're looking for something relatively flexible and without having to experiment with your health (much), maybe just omit these from your diet?

I agree with Luke that, for me at least, becoming veg*n has not detracted from my health or how I spend my time at all. 

In addition to the deontological argument, you could also consider a virtue ethics approach - thinking about the overall life pattern rather than discrete decisions. You care a lot about the suffering of animals. The virtue approach might ask: 
"How should someone who cares a lot about the suffering of animals live their daily life?" 

I find encouragement in the feeling that I am living more in harmony with my ethical beliefs, and that feeling goes beyond the results of the ethical calculus behind each discrete decision. 

Realizing I'm coming in late and many of my points have doubtlessly been addressed by other commenters, here are five thoughts:

1. This reminds me of Eliezer Yudkowsky's 2015 criticism of using vague flow-through effects, with animal welfare cited specifically.  He noted that at the extremes, it seems like the sort of warm-glow reasoning someone might use to justify donating to your local performing arts center or running the 5k Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure - both of which are perfectly fine things to do, but not traditionally seen as EA, so much as indulging in causes you may be personally passionate about on the side. I don't agree with him that we should never consider possible flow-though effects if they seem exceptionally plausible and intuitive, and we're explicit about just how much value we expect will come from them. But my sense is that the indirect social signaling, health, and productivity effects of dietary choices are either a wash, or not something we can accurately predict (much less generalize) with the level of rigor  EA typically expects. For example, maybe reduce-atarianism and a carbon tax actually have better flow-through effects, whereas inspiring many more privileged elites to become absolutist veg*ns will actually so annoy working-class people that it (and EA as a whole) gets politicized, which actually entrenches pro-meat-eating opinions. You can hypothesize either way. Pet theories about unquantifiable spillover impact feel like something I encourage EAs to engage in personally - just so we don't all follow the same groupthink - but not something I'd want to elevate as the established "EA thing to do."
    
2. Bolstering EA's moral authority by being ahead of the curve makes sense. But I think we already achieve this by funneling billions of dollars into advocacy to improve conditions on factory farms, other policy changes aiming to reduce suffering, and generally making a lot of noise about the problem. I'm very glad animal welfare is a major cause area within EA, and I donate to it. I'm even glad there are many vegetarians and vegans in EA, many of whom are more generous and disciplined than I am. But their marginal contribution to how much moral authority EA is perceived to have again seems pretty fuzzy to me.
    
3. (You seem to already get this due to your second paragraph, but for lurkers I'll write it anyway): The community-level debate relates to concerns about moral demandingness in EA. Yes, veg*nism is a costly symbol. So is, say, donating 30% of your income or more. But we don't typically think building a high-trust environment requires that community norm. We recognize that there's a wide range of sacrifices we all might make every day, which might achieve an equally broad range of impacts. And what bonds us as EAs is our concern for the outputs - not for the inputs. (The one exception is arguably the 10% giving pledge - but to many people, that's considerably easier than going veg*n, and in any case not mandatory). A high-trust environment does not demand a level of sacrifice beyond what most people are comfortable with. Above a basic threshold, "giving better" is enough. 
   
   For reasons of culture,  socioeconomics, family, and even personal preferences, giving up meat is a bigger sacrifice to some people than to others. The same could be said about sacrificing additional consumption spending; or, sacrificing career aspirations that interest and fulfill you, to dive into AI or bio-risk instead. We arguably "should" do all of these things; and technically, yeah, you probably "should" go vegan. But optimizing all of it would exhaust mere mortals. So we all navigate these decisions in unique ways tailored to our personal life situations, with an eye to which of the infinite potential sacrifices get the biggest bang for the sacrificial buck. I think it's perfectly defensible for an EA to say that the amount of good I'd achieve by going veg*n is not nearly as high as the amount of good I'd achieve for a comparable sacrifice elsewhere, and therefore it is very low on my list of things I should prioritize to become a better altruist.
    
4. The deontological argument is actually the one that most gives me pause. For example, everything I've said so far might also have applied to slavery in the 1800s. Thomas Jefferson might have said "well, who can tell what the flow-through effects of me freeing my slaves might be. Even if they're positive, I might achieve the same effects by just freeing my slaves upon my death. And I've already bolstered my moral authority by decrying slavery as evil, and advocating for its abolition. It's too morally demanding to expect me to forego the wealth of my massive estate while slavery remains." And today we would be appalled by this, even if he was better than many of his contemporaries.
   
   What weakens the deontological argument to me is our distance from the specific activity we actually object to. It is not evil to eat animals that are already dead; it is evil to torture animals on a factory farm. So in my analogy, meat-eaters are not Thomas Jefferson cracking the whip; they're more like someone in the north buying cotton clothing made with slave labor, which many abolitionists probably did. History is much kinder to these people, from the recognition that giving up cotton would have paled in comparison to the impact they had with their pen and voice. Likewise, my deontological intuitions just incline me to lobby for stronger laws around factory farming, and to castigate the people caging chickens 100x more than the people eating them.
    
5. Altogether, my rule of thumb is this. Think about how much you'd personally pay for the purely selfish convenience and pleasure of NOT having to go veg*n. Then calculate whether this amount would save more animals if given to ACE recommended charities than it would for you to go veg*n. If it would, then instead of going veg*n,  give this amount (or at minimum, an amount tailored to offset your meat consumption) to ACE charities, above and beyond whatever giving pledges you've already committed to. Repeat as necessary until guilt subsides. 
   
   If your guilt never subsides, then incorporate this psychic distress into your estimate of how much you actually enjoy eating meat! Maybe the amount you're willing to pay is lower than you think, or even negative, and actually going veg*n is the right decision for you.

On a community level, even while I'm not vegan, I've long appreciated the norm of having community events be vegan. I want to be vegan but it's hard. At such events, it's easy, it's a nice on-ramp to the idea that I might someday actually be vegan.

That said, I think it makes sense to avoid being too prescriptive about what other people should do? Like, I think I prefer the community where your eating habits are a personal choice, versus the community where you might be ostracized if you eat the wrong thing.

strengthens your altruistic motivations

I have a bit of resonance on this front -- I think veganism gives me altruistic momentum on the good days. On bad days, I think I can tell it takes it instead (usually I just opt not to eat vegan on such days). I think the "bad days" are currently my biggest blocker to 100% veganism.

health effects

I think this problem is solved if you cook for yourself or are willing to eat the same thing every meal, and is extremely unsolved if you don't like cooking and crave variety. This feels like the biggest societal blocker to veganism.

I think that it's relevant that, for some veg*ns, it would take more energy (emotional energy/willpower) not to be veg*n. For instance, having seen some documentaries, I am repulsed by the idea of eating meat due to the sheer emotional force of participating in the atrocities I saw. Maybe this is an indicator that I should spend more time trying to align my emotions to my ethical beliefs (which would, without the strong emotional force, point towards me eating animal products to save energy), but I'm not sure if that's worth the effort.

Maybe this implies that we shouldn't recommend documentaries on animal farming to EAs because it would lead to emotional bias against eating animal products? But I'm pretty sure seeing those documentaries expanded my moral circle in a very good way.

Effective altruists talk a lot about cooperation but I actually think its sort of pathologically uncooperative to eat meat. It seems pretty hard to dismiss the arguments for veganism. Lots of provably well informed EAs (in the sense they could score well on a test of EA knowledge) are going to settle on 'dont personally participate in enormous moral outrages'. Why would you personally make the problem worse? And make the social situation worse for vegan EAs. It's a very serious breach of solidarity. (Though maybe using the term solidarity outs me as a leftie)

Thanks for writing this! Epistemic note: I am engaging in highly motivated reasoning and arguing for veg*n. 

1. As BenStewart mentioned, virtue ethics seems relevant. I would similarly point to Kant’s moral imperative of universalizability: "act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law.” Not engaging in moral atrocities is a case where we should follow such an ideal in my opinion. We should at least consider the implications under moral uncertainty and worldview diversification. 
2. My journey in EA has in large part been a journey of “aligning my life and my choices to my values,” or trying to lead a more ethical life. To this end, it is fairly clear that being veg*n is the ethical thing to do relative to eating animal products (I would note I’m somewhere between vegan and vegetarian, and I think moving toward veganism is ethically better).
3. The signaling effect of being veg*n seems huge at both an individual and community level. As Luke Freeman mentioned, it would be hard to take EA seriously if we were less veg*n than average. Personally, I would likely not be in EA if being veg*n wasn’t relatively normal. This was a signal to me that these people really care and aren’t just in it when it’s convenient for them. This point seems pretty important and one of the things that hopefully sets EA apart from other communities oriented around doing good. I want to call back Ben Kuhn’s idea from 2013 of trying vs. pretending to try in terms of EA:

“A lot of effective altruists still end up satisficing—finding actions that are on their face acceptable under core EA standards and then picking those which seem appealing because of other essentially random factors.”

3.5. At an individual level, when I tell people about Intro to EA seminars I can say things like “In Week 3 we read about expanding our moral consideration and animal welfare. I realized that I wasn’t giving animals the moral consideration I think they deserve, and now I try to eat fewer animal products to align my values and my actions.” (I’ve never said it this eloquently). While I haven’t empirically tested it, people seem to like anecdotes like this. 

4. I think as a community we’re asking for a lot of trust; something like “we want to align AI to not kill us all, and nobody else is doing it, so you have to trust us to do it.” Maybe this is an argument for hedging under moral uncertainty, or similarly trying to be less radical. I feel like an EA that is mostly veg*n is less radical than one with no veg*ns due to some of the other ethical claims we make (e.g., strong longtermism). Being less radical while still upholding our values sounds like a  reasonable spot to be in when (implicitly) asking for the reigns to the future.

4.5 In this awesome paper, Evan Williams argues that hedging against individual possible moral catastrophes is quite difficult. In this case, it appears to me that we can still hedge here, and we should, given our position of influence. 

5. Intuitively, diversifying across a range of activities that might be valuable seems useful. So having some things that are 0.01% chance of avoiding x-risk, some things that are 10% chance of reducing animal suffering, some things that are 95% chance of reducing malaria deaths, and 50% chance of reducing the number of animals suffering on factory farms. I need to write out my thoughts on this in more detail, but I think it’s useful to diversify across {chance of having any impact at all}, and not eating animals is a place where we can be pretty sure we’re having an impact in the long term. 

Peter Singer's 1980 paper  Utilitarianism and Vegetarianism might answer your concerns. Here's a relevant quote from the conclusion of his paper:

"I advocate vegetarianism as something which "underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of animals" (Animal Liberation, p. I71). I remain convinced that for those concerned to change the situation of animals in our society, vegetarianism is of real practical importance. It provides an irrefutable answer to the oft-repeated claim that we need factory farms to feed our growing population. It allows the animal welfare campaigner to defeat ad hominem attacks, for instance: 'How can you object to killing seals when you eat pigs and calves?' By eliminating one's personal involvement in the production of animals for food, it makes it easier to take a detached view of the animal industry, and to avoid compromising the interests of the animals with one's own interest as a consumer of animals. Calling on the public not to buy the produce of factory farms can be an important part of a campaign against factory farming. It holds out a threatening prospect to farmers-one which is beginning to be noticed in farming magazines-and it enables those who support the campaign against factory farming to make a personal commitment which goes beyond signing petitions and writing letters to their elected representatives. One cannot convincingly ask others to do this if one does not do it oneself. (Unless one eats animal flesh in secret-which hardly seems worth the hypocrisy and risk of discovery involved.)

Finally, becoming a vegetarian is a way of attesting to the depth and sincerity of one's belief in the wrongness of what we are doing to animals. Perhaps in a society of sophisticated philosophers there would be no need to attest to one's sincerity in this way, because sophisticated philosophers would understand that one can sincerely oppose the exploitation of animals in factory farms while continuing to buy and enjoy the product of these very farms. But to most of the members of our society this would mean, as it seemed to Oliver Goldsmith's fictitious Chinese traveler, a "strange contrariety of conduct."

As in human ethics, the perspective of the victims cuts through this topic pretty cleanly for me.

As a thought experiment, imagine writing an article considering these sorts of nuances re: a human ethics topic where individuals are needlessly being harmed & killed for the pleasure of others.

Don't forget the benefits of normalising vegetarianism/veganism for the people around you. This makes the impact of being vegetarian/vegan bigger than just the number of chickens you don't eat.
 

My sister has been vegetarian since she was 6 and has passively inspired many of the rest of our family to either become vegetarian/vegan or at least reduce our meat consumption. I have in turn inspired other people to make changes. My sister's impact is much more than just the animals she hasn't eaten.

I think we tend to forget that large-scale social changes result from lots of people making "insignificant" individual choices which gently pressure others to change. It's a snowball effect  that is hard to measure and predict, so it's easy to feel like our personal choices don't matter.

I generally see my own vegetarianism as a utilitarian virtue that I've cultivated. It feels mostly costless to me now; in fact I feel better doing it than not. I think we should generally try to cultivate such virtues that align with impactful action, but also agree that going veg*n may not be equally effective on the margin for everyone (for a variety of reasons). Still, I'd feel most proud of being in a movement where people didn't simply accept the psychological costs of some altruistic action, but tried to align their personal utility function more with the universe's (which is what I mean by "utilitarian virtue").

(This is not to say that you personally are "simply accepting" this; I know you to be a very deliberate and thoughtful person. I am just uncomfortable with community members consistently resolving this question on first-order considerations of the psychological pleasure of veg*nism without considering the second-order question of whether the first-order is malleable.)

(Also agree with some of the other comments complicating the CEA of veg*nism on wild animal welfare grounds)

Good points, thanks for writing them up. Maybe also worth considering:

• increased demand for plant-based alternatives -> more and higher quality supply -> more people finding it easier to replace meat
• one might compare analogue situations in history and wonder if not benefitting from something one considers immoral even though the marginal effect of it is negligible
  • I suppose slavery, maybe some situations where man benefitted from unequal rights for women?

I’ve written about this topic in “Levels of Moral Cooperation.”

What level of cooperation with other activists or general agenty people is optimal? Everyone needs to “pick their battles” to maximize their impact and stay sane, but what does it look like in practice when you interact with those who’ve picked different “battles”? In this article I sketch some initial ideas I’ve had and hope to encourage others to test and refine them. There’s a lot of potential for someone with more knowledge of game theory to make them greatly more rigorous, nuanced, and reliable.

The post exceeded my timebox for it, so I’m a bit unhappy with its structure. Sorry about that.

The general idea is that:

1. There are a lot of moral entrepreneurs driving social change that we agree with.
2. They are successful to different degrees in different social bubbles.
3. There are thresholds that are hard to exceed, but above which social pressures lead to rapid success.

I wanted to develop a general framework that can be applied to all sorts of valuable social change, such as antispeciesism, antiracism, antisubstratism, antisexism, antiageism, etc. Hence my post covers a lot more details and edge cases. Here I’ll try to apply it to this case.

Maybe someone, a parent, has internalized the phrase “Spare the rod; spoil the child.” The child is dear to them and has 80+ years to live, so they don’t want to risk spoiling all of that (which parallels the health argument above). (They don’t know about the risks of traumatizing their child for life, just as meats can also have negative health effects.) Given their limited epistemic situation, the decision can look broadly similar to the one related to veganism.

Another guideline is to not walk on grass because it risks crushing like a dozen or so of invertebrates with every step. Or not living in cities that use surface water for the freshwater supply, because the filtration process kills uncounted numbers of beings. But maybe some great networking opportunity is tied to hikes across meadows or to that city with surface water.

To me the great difference is that I live in a community of friends and relatives that is fully – for all I know – strongly against beating children. The norm is so strong that even if someone violated it, it would backfire on them and not meaningfully weaken the norm. I treat this norm as a hard rule, but really I rarely think about it because it’s so universally endorsed in my circles.

I’m also in a community that is almost completely vegn, but not quite to the same extend that it is against violence against children, also because of nonvegan influences from the outside. I treat the vegn norm as a hard rule particularly because it seems somewhat fragile to me, like a tiny budding flower.

I’m also in a community that generally gets caring about invertebrates and has read some Brian Tomasik, but that doesn’t usually, with some exceptions, take care not to use surface water or not to step on grass. So I don’t treat this as a hard rule because I’m not optimistic (yet) that I can spread it up to its threshold. That can change though. (Your milage may vary if you’re particularly influential, high-status, charismatic, etc.)

So particularly when I feel that something is close to its threshold, from one side or the other, I take care to take into account in my cost-benefit calculation not only the costs and benefits that are mediated through me but also the costs and benefits that spreading the norm has.

And if in doubt I rather overestimate the closeness to the threshold since the societal costs can be great, have great variance, and are hard to know, but my personal costs are usually quite low variance and relatively well knowable. So you could say that I try to be at least a bit better than what I think the norm is, for all norms around me.

Insofar as we are all imperfect and have to figure out which ways to prioritize improving on, it isn't obvious that we should treat veganism as a priority. That said, I think there is an important difference between what it makes sense to do and how it makes sense to feel. It makes sense to feel horrified by factory farming and disgusted by factory farmed meat if you care about the suffering of animals. It makes sense to respond to suffering inflicted on your behalf with sadness and regret.

Effective altruists should generally be vegan, not (just) because it is the right thing to do, but because that behavior follows naturally from the right way to feel. This is not to say that you should try to change how you feel if you're not inclined to at least a little sadness at the sight of a dead chicken's body on your plate, but something has gone wrong.

Getting people to eat more beef/dairy and less chicken/fish is one animal welfare strategy that EAs should consider promoting. Since cows are large, it takes fewer animals to produce a single unit of food. Brian Tomasik compiled this list of the amount of suffering generated by different animal foods, and beef/dairy are ranked the lowest. Vitalik Buterin has argued that eating only cow products may be 99% as good as veganism. In addition to this, getting people to eat only beef/dairy may have more mass appeal. Few people are willing to become vegan, but far more people may be willing to give up animal products with the exception of beef/dairy.

An argument against that doesn't seem directly considered here: veganism might turn some high-potential people off without compensatory benefits, and very high base rates of non-veganism (~99% of western people are non-vegan IIRC) means this may matter even on relatively marginal effects.

Obviously many things can be mitigated significantly by being kind/accommodating (though at some level there's a little remaining implied "you are doing bad"). But even accounting for that, a few things remain despite accommodating. E.g.

• People feel can vaguely outgroupy because most core EAs in many groups are vegan, & most new people will feel slightly awkward about that, which affects likely comfort & future involvement in EA spaces
• On the margin, promising people may not repeatedly come to events that would expose them to EA ideas because they don't like the food (empirically this was a fairly common complaint at newbie events in my university). E.g. it may not be filling if you don't like tofu variants, which a significant fraction of the population doesn't
• Probably more things. Diet & dinners are fairly central to people's social lives, so I'd expect other effects too.

And to be clear, there are plausible compensatory benefits that you highlight. Though they're not direct effects, so I wonder if they could be gotten in other ways without the possible downsides

I've thought about a lot of this stuff too, so I understand how the value can seem uncertain. These are some reasons I became [more] vegan. 
1. I don't participate in factory farming suffering - any good impact is good to me, a penny saved is a penny earned. Even a small impact matters to me. 
2. I avoid taking lives 
3. I feel better - probably because of eating healthier and maybe also more in control of my decisions. A mostly or entirely vegan diet might also just be healthier for some reason. Chimps and Bonobos are our closest relatives and their diets are 95% vegan or more, so maybe that means something? I digress. 
4. I eat healthier - most unhealthy food I am exposed to is nonvegan. If it's disqualified by being nonvegan it eliminates a lot of unhealthy food and a lot of wasted thinking about eating it or not. I don't feel like I'm missing out because it's not an option and not in alignment with how I want to live and feel. 
5. I build up discipline, a great transferable habit. Resisting convenience is a good skill because many convenient or easy things are bad. 
6. I show other people being vegan is simple, beneficial, and enjoyable. People I know are more curious about becoming vegan now than when they didn't know anyone. 
7. I shrink my carbon footprint. 

I think personal decisions matter and calculations claiming they are low impact generally miss some of the social nature of our decisions. When millions of people do something, it has a big effect. Even one person doing something has an effect. But if we only look at one person isolated from any social context, we would never think about the spillover effects and multipliers. For example, leaving a couple pieces of trash in a park makes other people more likely to do the same. We have to start somewhere because change doesn't usually pop into existence all across society suddenly. Big shifts are often gradual until they reach tipping points. We need demand for a market to grow and mature. 

It seems like a pretty low cost thing to do for those benefits. It's hard for me to see how becoming vegan would prevent most people from doing other things. A few hours of research on what to eat to get a balanced diet was all it took for me. But maybe I am an outlier. Though I think we're often far more flexible in our behavior than we realize. Habits are very powerful. Novel becomes normal very quickly. So it seems to me like becoming more vegan would be either neutral or beneficial for most people.  

For me, having been a strict vegetarian since primary school, I'd have to consider the inverse question: As an EA, should I start eating meat?

Eating meat seems to involve a lot of hassle. I'd have to learn a lot about different types of meat, where to buy them, how to prepare them, figure out what I like and so on. Right now, I just don't perceive meat as food, and the thought of eating it feels kind of gross because of the killing and mess involved.

I would lose a bit of status among my green friends, and people would perceive me as morally inconsistent.

On the other hand, I see a few benefits to eating meat. In other countries, even here in Europe, it's very much the norm to eat meat, and much harder to eat vegetarian. Travelling there is always a bit of an extra hassle for me.
There might be a health benefit, though I'm not really sure what to expect here.

I guess the synthesis here is that I should sometimes eat meat for convenience, e.g. when travelling, but be sure to label it as an exception, so I don't lose my values.

What are some plausible stories for how being vegan makes the far-future non-trivially better? My bar here is something like "me being vegan is 1/1000th as impactful as working on a biosecurity project for my entire career," so e.g. I claim that being vegan wastes something like 0.1% of EA's time (which is an underestimate for me at least -- I often spend 10s of counterfactual minutes searching for meatless food; for reference, 1/1000th of waking hours for seven days is about seven minutes).
 

Is this story the reason you are vegan?

Links are all borked, they've still got your Blogger previews.

Thirdly, the question of whether going veg*n strengthens your altruistic motivations is an empirical one which I feel pretty uncertain about. There may well be a moral licensing effect where veg*ns feel (disproportionately) like they’ve done their fair share of altruistic action; or maybe parts of you will become resentful about these constraints. This probably varies a lot for different people. ... I think probably the dominant factor is how your motivational structure works, in particular whether you’ll interpret the additional moral constraint more as a positive reinforcement of your identity as an altruist, or more as something which drains or stresses you.

Yeah for me I enjoy little reminders that I'm legit and not just a guy who likes writing takes about the community or selfishly wants license to do the kind of math/engineering demands of speculative projects in the epistemics and alignment spaces. Abstaining from meat is a costly self-signal, and is one source of these reminders, but at the same time it's probably less effective than my AMF donations (which is also a source of these reminders) and at my income:donation ratio level more costly. It may not be rational at all, but I have enough uncertainty about some of the offsetting premises to mostly keep doing it. 

Fourthly, I am kinda worried about health effects, especially on short-to-medium-term energy levels.

I've been mostly (~98%) vegan since 2013. This concern really surprised me, because the health benefits of eating plant based are clearly extraordinary in my view. It was actually the primary driver for me going from vegetarian to vegan, with concern for the farmed animals growing later.

I would say that the very short term effects (1-2 weeks) can be disruptive as the bacteria in your gut become re-selected from bacteria that feed on meat or dairy to ones that feed on fibrous foods - veggies, fruit, legumes, nuts etc. But the 2-weeks-to-rest-of-life health benefits are massive. Ranging from higher energy levels to prevention of many kinds of diseases, greatly lower risk of heart disease, lower cholesterol levels, lower blood pressure, easier to lose/maintain weight... the list goes on. It does require actually eating more cruciferous and other veg, berries and other fruits, legumes, spices to etc. though and not just being a junk food vegan who eats cookies and crackers all the time. And you do need to supplement with vitamin B12 because this essential nutrient gets stripped from the fruits and veg when we wash them (and it is a good idea to still wash them).

Highly recommend exploring Dr. Michael Greger's work (https://nutritionfacts.org/) if anyone is curious about health questions around plant-based/vegan diet. He's an evidence-based/altruistic M.D. nutritionist and does great work separating out the quality nutrition research from ones with methodological errors, bias from funding sources etc. (I am in no way affiliated and his work as I understand it is not for profit.)

It seems like many of the disagreements in the comments comes from disagreements about the moral status of animals.

In an expected value calculation, it is fine to offset greenhouse gas emissions with true counterfactual offsets because there isn't a clear case of one moral actor causing harm to a moral patient, and the harm can be completely compensated for.  But most people would object to the idea of killing someone, selling their organs on the black market, and then donating the money to prevent other people from dying from easily preventable diseases.  Here there is a clear case of a specific moral actor causing specific, serious harm to a moral patient.  The harm can't be undone.  While the first greenhouse gas example doesn't have a clear justice angle, the second organ harvesting one does.

Vegans tend to see a strong justice case involved when eating animals - there is clearly a specific moral patient being harmed (eaten).  Non-vegans may grant that animals can suffer, but don't fully elevate them to a moral status where justice concerns matter.  If there isn't a justice angle, then expected value logic applies and the desire to reduce suffering can be fluidly traded off against perceived inconvenience.  The moral severity of taking a life doesn't register.

The exclusion of justice considerations is speciesist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speciesism), and we should be cautious about denying full moral consideration simply based on species membership.  If we are broadly worried about reducing suffering and moral circle expansion, keeping justice concerns for animals at the forefront of conversations about eating meat is important.
 

I find the argument for veg*nism based on expected value fairly compelling. In a developed nation, factory farming is dominant. In a factory farm, it seems like ~all animals have net negative lives. Not eating animal products reduces demand for those animal products, leading to less animals with net negative lives being raised on factory farms.

You say that this value isn't very big, and perhaps it isn't. But neither is the cost? Veg*n food in my experience is as healthy, potentially cheaper, and similarly effortful to make as home-cooked non-veg*n food. 

You mention moral licensing. My prior for social science research being true is pretty low so I'd tend to think this effect is small or non-existent. A 5-second google search revealed a meta-analysis of ~90 studies studying ~7000 participants, only including those with a control. They found the magnitude of the effect to be a Cohen's d of .31 which is small. Also unpublished studies had smaller effect sizes than published ones, which makes me more skeptical. 

Informal citation: A Meta-Analytic Review of Moral Licensing. Irene Blanken et al. 2015.

You also mention health/energy costs. As far as I know, the consensus is that well-planned diets whether veg*n or not are all healthy, with some (crappy? I haven't looked into it) research that veganism is good for you. Vegan for Life by Jack Norris and Virginia Messina gives this conclusion and seems to be right. I hope someone will tell me if this opinion about health is wrong though!

On the signaling value of vegetarianism/veganism, this recent post by Holly Elmore is relevant:

We all hate virtue signaling, right? Even “virtue” itself has taken on a negative connotation. When we’re too preoccupied with how we appear to others, or even too preoccupied with being virtuous, it makes us inflexible and puts us out of touch with our real values and goals.

But I believe the pendulum has swung too far. I don’t care to defend empty “cheap talk” signals, but the best virtue signals offer some proof of their claim by being difficult to fake. Maybe, like being vegan, they take a great deal of forethought, awareness, and require regular social sacrifices. Being vegan proves dedication to a cause like animal rights or environmentalism proportional to the level of sacrifice required. The virtuous sacrifice of being vegan isn’t what makes veganism good for the animals or the environment, but it is a costly signal of character traits associated with the ability to make such a sacrifice, which may include commitment, being deeply bought into the cause such that the sacrifice becomes easier than it would be for other people, conscientiousness, gentleness, etc. Out of your commitment to doing the most good possible, you may notice that veganism isn’t actually the best way to help animals for a lot of people. I believe this represents a step forward for helping animals, but one problem is that now it’s much easier to hide lack of virtuous character traits from measurement. It’s harder to know where the lines are or how to track the character of the people you may one day have to decide to trust or not to trust, and it’s harder to be accountable to yourself.

Hi Richard, I recently wrote a post that tackles the concern on whether personal choice on veganism can have meaningful consequences: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/aMFFWhiQX5DvaZSDp/the-tipping-point-case-for-vegan-advocacy

Short answer, yes. Personal choices can help shift the S-curve for the transition, which has huge consequences. 

Thirdly, the question of whether going veg*n strengthens your altruistic motivations is an empirical one which I feel pretty uncertain about. There may well be a moral licensing effect where veg*ns feel (disproportionately) like they’ve done their fair share of altruistic action; or maybe parts of you will become resentful about these constraints. This probably varies a lot for different people.

Related to this is this study finding:

Across six experiments, including one conducted with individuals involved in policymaking, we show that introducing a green energy default nudge diminishes support for a carbon tax.

Thank you for the great post! I wrote a reply that is too long for here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AZyJdher64htcpKti/re-some-thoughts-on-vegetarianism-and-veganism

my personal consumption decisions just have such a tiny effect compared to my career/donation decisions that it feels like I shouldn’t pay much attention to their direct consequences

This isn't an argument against veganism; it's an argument against prioritizing  veganism as a cause area.  And EA isn't prioritizing veganism as far as I can tell?

 I worry it could be really easy for EA to become a community where people rationalize doing bad things on account of the fact that those things are just a little bit bad compared to all the good things they do.

I really don't want EA to become that.

Leave it to EAs to spend endless words rationalizing something they want / rationalizing away something that is "inconvenient."