I’ve noticed a recurring argument in EA spaces around veganism: “If I donate enough money to effective animal charities, I’ll save more animals than I would by going vegan. So, I don’t need to personally stop consuming animal products.” While this may sound compelling on the surface, I believe it fails for several reasons—both ethically and practically.
First-Order Utilitarianism Can Justify Harm
This argument relies on a pure first-order utilitarian outlook, where harm is permissible as long as it’s “offset” by a greater good. Taken to its logical extreme, this reasoning leads to absurd conclusions: “If I donate $10,000 to save two lives, I’m morally justified in taking one life because it’s convenient or enjoyable.”
Second-Order Effects: Ethics Become a Privilege for the Wealthy
A system where individuals can buy their way out of ethical harm creates an inequitable moral landscape:
- The Wealthy: Can offset harm without personal sacrifice, effectively “paying to win” the ethical game.
- The Poor: Are left to shoulder a disproportionate moral burden. If they can’t afford to offset their consumption, they are unfairly judged as less ethical.
This framework commodifies morality, allowing wealth to shield individuals from accountability while punishing those without means. Ethics should not be reduced to a transactional system where only those with resources can be “good people.”
Personal Sacrifice and Offsetting Aren’t Mutually Exclusive
Another flaw in this argument is the assumption that personal sacrifices and wealth-based offsetting are mutually exclusive. They’re not. You can—and should—strive to minimise harm to the greatest degree you can while simultaneously leveraging your resources to maximise positive impact.
Veganisms Signalling Effect: The Power of Visible Ethical Action
Veganism also carries a unique advantage that’s often overlooked: its signalling power. It’s perceived by society as requiring a significant sacrifice—effort, consistency, and energy—when, in reality, it’s far simpler than people think.
Correcting the record is important, but this perception creates a surprising benefit: visible ethical actions inspire others. Seeing someone willingly make personal sacrifices for the sake of morality encourages others to act ethically, too.
- Social Influence: This is the same principle behind actions like picking up litter. When people observe you doing something altruistic with low cost but high moral visibility, they’re more likely to engage in altruistic behavior themselves.
- Societal Impact: Ethical signaling builds cultural momentum. It normalizes the idea that individuals should take personal responsibility to reduce harm, inspiring others to reflect on their actions.
This alone is a compelling reason to adopt veganism, even beyond the core animal ethics. Ethical actions ripple outward—strengthening communities and fostering a more moral society.
While donating to effective animal charities is a powerful way to reduce harm, it doesn’t absolve us of the responsibility to minimise the harm we personally cause. Ethical behaviour shouldn’t be commodified or reduced to a transaction where the wealthy can “offset” harm while the less privileged carry the moral burden.
By going vegan, we not only act in alignment with our values but also send a powerful signal that we’re willing to make sacrifices for the greater good. This signaling has real, tangible benefits—encouraging others to take action and fostering a culture where morality isn’t about convenience, but about accountability.
My main confusion with your argument is that I don't understand why donations don't also count as "personal ethics" or as "visible ethical action" that could likewise "ripple outward" and be replicated by others to good effect. (I also think the section on "equity" fundamentally confuses what ethics should be about. I care about helping beneficiaries, not setting up an "equitable moral landscape" among agents, if the latter involves preventing the rich from pursuing easy moral wins because this would be "unfair" to those who can't afford to donate.)
One more specific point I want to highlight:
fwiw, my argument does not have this feature. I instead argue that:
Out of interest, what is it you consider so effortful about becoming vegan that it would so substantially reduce the effort you could put towards other causes? Do you think it is knock-on effects of enjoying food less, effort required to learn to change your meals, effects from finding it harder socially, or something else?
The actual effort to change to a vegan diet isn't that high in my view, at least if you have access to a decent supermarket (having done it) - it's just learning to make some different foods and remembering to buy some multivitamins once in a while (or at least B12). Once you've done the learning, it's not really an ongoing extra effort (like there's not really an ongoing effort in knowing how to cook omni food), and the benefits accrue over time.
I wonder if people overestimate the effect on enjoyment. First, if you find vegan alternatives that you enjoy, then you don't lose out a lot. Second, I think most EAs are probably familiar with hedonic adaptation, and how your happiness levels seem to be pretty resilient to lifestyle changes in the long-term (hence making donating money seem like less of a big deal) - so switching food also seems unlikely to really make you emotionally worse off. Third, we probably spend less than an hour per day with food in our mouths - it doesn't seem like it should be that important to overall wellbeing - I recall Daniel Kahnemann making a point that we overestimate the impact of certain things because we imagine the effect when we are doing them but not the lack of effect during all the time we are not doing them.
Social is quite situation-dependent. But if it's just that you have friends who take you to restaurants with no decent vegan option, it doesn't prevent being vegan in other meals. Shared meals with family who won't accept vegan food would seem trickier, but again there are surely some meals where a person could normally be independent.
Edit - or I guess worries about health could be another reason? Well, I don't know of good evidence that being vegan with a varied, not-heavily-processed diet whilst taking extras of certain vitamins has substantial negative effects (and if anything physical health seems to be better than with typical omni diets).
Mostly just changing old habits, plus some anticipated missing of distinctive desired tastes. It's not an unreasonable ask or anything, but I'd much rather just donate more. (In general, I suspect there's insufficient social pressure on people to increase our donations to good causes, which also shouldn't be "so effortful", and we likely overestimate the personal value we get from marginal spending on ourselves.)
I think in general if we agree to a ballpark of "10% donations is enough to satisfice some goodness thresholds", and also to "It would be good for social pressure to exist for everyone to do at least threshold amount of good", I think it raises various considerations.
10% makes sense to me as a schelling point (and I think the tables that scale by income bracket are also sensible).
But if the threshold amount of good would be "Donate 10%, aim for an impactful career, become vegan" (which is what I feel the social pressure inside EA is pointing towards), I think that is already a significant ask for many people.
I think it is also important to note that some people are more motivated by trying to maximize impact and offset harm, and some people more motivated by minimizing harm and satisficing for impact. (Of course a standard total utilitarian model would output that whatever maximizes your net impact is best, but human value systems aren't perfectly utilitarian.)
How do "donate 10%, become vegan, aim for an impactful", and "donate 30%", and "donate 20%, aim for an impactful career" compare in effectiveness as norms? I think this is pretty hard to estimate.
What kind of social pressure are you pointing here? Is it more in the direction of "donate 30%" or "donate as much as you can and aim for an impactful career?" Or do you mean social pressure in the wider society, and not within the EA community?
(Fwiw I think people underestimate the value of effective marginal spending on themselves, when considering areas of spending where there is space for significant extra value (Like purchasing more free time.). People plausibly overestimate the value on some other things, especially if one doesn't do spending introspectiont.)
What do you think it is about going vegan that would prevent you from donating more? I'm still not sure of the causal link.
It's mostly not anything specific to going vegan. Just the general truism that effort used for one purpose could be used for something else instead. (Plus I sometimes donate extra precisely for the purpose of "offsetting", which I wouldn't otherwise be motivated to do.)
I agree with 1, but I think the framing feels forced for point #2.
I don't think it's obvious that these actions would be strongly in tension with each other. Donating to effective animal charities would correlate quite strongly with being vegan.
Homo economicus deciding what to eat for dinner or something lol.
I actually totally agree that donations are an important part of personal ethics! Also, I am all aboard for the social ripple effects theory of change for effective donation. Hell yes to both of those points. I might have missed it, but I don't know that OP really argues against those contentions? I guess they don't frame it like that though.
I don't understand the relevance of the correlation claim. People who care nothing for animals won't do either. But that doesn't show that there aren't tradeoffs in how to use one's moral efforts on the margins. (Perhaps you're thinking of each choice as a binary: "donate some" Y/N + "go vegan" Y/N? But donating isn't binary. What matters is how much you donate, and my suggestion is that any significant effort spent towards adopting a vegan diet might be better spent on further increasing one's donations. It depends on the details, of course. If you find adopting veganism super easy, like near-zero effort required, then great! Not much opportunity cost, then. But others may find that it requires more effort, which could be better used elsewhere.)
Ya, idk, I am just saying that the tradeoff framing feels unnatural. Or, like, maybe that's one lens, but I don't actually generally think in terms of tradeoffs b/w my moral efforts.
Like, I get tired of various things ofc, but it's not usually just cleanly fungible b/w different ethical actions I might plausibly take like that. To the extent it really does work this way for you or people you know on this particular tradeoff, then yep; I would say power to ya for the scope sensitivity.
I agree that the quantitative aspect of donation pushes towards even marginal internal tradeoffs here mattering and I don't think I was really thinking about it as necessarily binary.