When should an Effective Altruist be vegetarian?

I agree with the weakest statement that you make in this article, namely that vegetarianism is not a totally obvious conclusion from EA premises, and non-vegetarian EAs should not be shamed or moralized at.

That said, I think your imaginary vegetarian debate partner is making a pretty bad pro-vegetarian case. For instance:

• You managed to list six considerations that weigh against vegetarianism in your sketched-out cost-effectiveness analysis, but none that weigh for it. This is surprising, since there are plenty such considerations! Here are examples of a few:

  • The cost-effectiveness estimate for The Humane League is likely non-robust and biased upwards (so when this bias is accounted for, it costs more to avert the same amount of harm through donation rather than through personal choices)
  • Even "cage-free eggs" are very unlikely to be suffering-free, since the farmer is optimizing for "ability to put the label 'cage-free' on the eggs" and not actually reducing the suffering of the chickens
  • Each consumed animal is responsible for some flow-through deaths on expectation, due to e.g. animal deaths while their feed is being harvested, which weighs against the conversion to human QALYs or cage-free egg subsidies
  • The inconvenience-cost-per-meal of vegetarianism falls dramatically as you get used to being vegetarianism
  • Even if logically inconvenience-from-donating and inconvenience-from-vegetarianism should be perfectly fungible, this is likely untrue/psychologically impractical in practice
  • Torture on factory farms may be worse than a painless death, so averting one factory-farmed year might save more than one QALY

• "Vegetables harm animals too" is likely not actually a consideration that weighs against, because the farmed animals are fed vegetables as well (see above consideration).

• You claim that eating cheaply and eating vegetarianism are in tension. This seems extremely unlikely to be true to me. Meat is expensive.

• More broadly, the case that eating fewer animals causes fewer animals to be harmed is very robust and common-sense, whereas the case for instead offsetting the harm with increased donations seems rather fragile and uncertain.

Again, I agree with the suggestion that there are parameters someone could stick into your calculations for their personal estimates of the moral value of small animals, personal ability to funge different types of inconveniences, personal trust in multiplying-lots-of-numbers versus robust common-sense arguments, etc. But I think this parameter space is smaller than you're giving it credit for.

I think the stronger case for being veg*n is that one of our goals is to make other people care more about all other beings. Starting conversations about how farm animals shouldn't be treated cruelly is one of the most frequent opportunities to broach that issue, both with aspiring effective altruists, and the general public.

The welfare of animals is one of the cases where mainstream morality is most misguided. Being veg*n allows you to discuss important moral issues almost every time you eat with other people. I find this often leads onto other issues as well, like effective charity. If you are good at having these conversations, it could be well worth the inconvenience.

First off, you can view vegetarianism as a gradient and the goal is to decrease meat consumption, not “avoid it at all costs”. With this approach, you can, when significantly inconvenient otherwise, consume some meat. Problem solved – right? I hope you’re not fighting a straw-man of “you must be a strict vegetarian at all costs” because THAT is a very weak position to hold.

I feel a lot of what’s at stake pivots on just how inconvenient (empirically) decreasing meat consumption for yourself is. It can surely seem inconvenient to anyone who hasn’t chosen to start, but just like most habits, they are hardly noticeable once you’re done converting. In this case I suspect the “difficult” part will last less than 2 months. Again, it’s not about making a switch to a vegetables-only diet, but a simple habit of consuming less meat when the costs are small.

You seem to severely overestimate the difficulties of consuming less meat when say “vegetarianism means spending a bit more time searching for vegetarian alternatives, researching nutrition, buying supplements, writing emails back to people who invite you to dinner explaining your dietary restrictions, etc.” I suspect all people will spend at least SOME time researching which food is relatively healthy. I think it’s an inevitable part of growing up, that’s not a large cost – you do it once and you’re done. Vegetarianism, insofar as it’s different from the norm, might mean you have to put in extra research hours (it’s not many!), but you do it once and you’re done. The question is whether it’s worth putting in the hours –and because your decision affects a significant amount of suffering you will otherwise cause during your life– I’m confident it’s worth it. Sometimes it helps to hear how the complaint you make works in other scenarios: “being a good parent means a bit more time searching …” or “being a good EA means a bit more time searching …” It seems to me that when it’s an important enough issue, you grit your teeth (if you don’t like the process) and do the research. I’m sorry if I’m missing something about the argument.

Saying it is difficult to switch is downright baffling to me. When you’re in a restaurant, I can’t comprehend why it’s more difficult to choose a vegetarian option over a meat-based dish. And when shopping at a store, it’s just as easy to buy the meatless-patties or fake-chicken. Where is the extra willpower or attention cost you speak of? Perhaps you’re not defending making a meat-dish choice in these scenarios, but please let us know.

In your argument you mention that going vegetarian is like “donating to a random developing world charity because it relieves the suffering of an impoverished child more than foregoing $5 increases your suffering.” To make the analogy with vegetarianism more appropriate, you would also have to be the overwhelming cause of that child’s misery unless you gave the $5. For example, you’re already paying some people to keep some children in cages, and you could choose to spend $5 more, so one less child is kept in a cage.

With the significant health benefits of a vegetable-based diet (at least over a typical american diet), there are even selfish reasons to base your diet around vegetables. I am puzzled why you think the health benefits are minimal. Some research studies suggest vegetarians live significantly longer than non-vegetarians.

Finally, I won’t comment on your calculations, but I find them deeply problematic.

I would like to offer advice about your approach. Please seriously consider the opposing position. Consider steel manning. Do some reading about vegans and why they live as they do. Find and talk to some well educated vegans too.

There is a total of one paragraph giving passing mentions of several relatively insignificant reasons to be vegan and yet you dedicate entire paragraphs to each of "I can't supplement", "I might have to waste time talking about my diet" and "Meat tastes good." This doesn't give me the impression that you want to discover which of two possible future states are superior.

So again, deeply consider the best available versions of living as an omnivore and a vegan and choose between the two.

Disclaimer: I am a vegan, though I think this advice is debate and position neutral.

To me, four important effective altruism barriers are cognitive dissonance, akrasia, arrogance and value erosion. More precisely:

• cognitive dissonance as deliberately choosing to be nasty so as to gain some small amount of fungible resource which can be spent on effective charity
• akrasia as choosing not to give because somehow you don't feel like it, hoarding your money because you can always spend it later
• arrogance as believing that because you have access to and trust in a specific piece of knowledge (in this case charity effectiveness), you will have vastly more effect on the world than an average person
• value erosion as future selves deciding they don't care about animals after all.

I think cognitive dissonance and value erosion work similarly here, and both point in favour of veganism.

Arrogance is a complicated one because it might actually be true that you have a huge positive effect compared to an average person (it's kind of what we're striving for). But actually alieving it might be problematic, and it might make sense to just be a vegan and unplug your phone chargers when not in use in order to feel more normal.

Akrasia could work both ways - there's a possibility that veganism could "use up" your charitableness, which would certainly be a bad thing. But on the other hand veganism might help you integrate socially with other vegan activists, which might be a motivating factor to give.

Thanks for the post! Transplanting a comment from the open thread:

Your thoughts about about trading inconveniences and displeasures are interesting. Would it be good to encourage a norm that all goods and "currencies" that take part in one's altruism activities should be tradeable with one another? Is this psychologically realistic?

A similar set of themes came up in the recent post about kidney donation: "we wouldn't encourage someone to donate a kidney if it meant they would forego significant donations to GiveWell's top charities. But we don’t see why that should be the case, since giving a kidney is a complement to and not a replacement for monetary donation." Would you make roughly the same argument there as you do about trading inconvenience and displeasure?

Because we live in a speciesist culture, it's easy to talk about animals as if they were things that were made for our pleasure. I'd like to propose a thought experiement that replaces non-human animals with humans because I think it's a useful way to see through the specisism, the belief that humans count morally and other animals don't.

Suppose a hypothetical world in which 99% of the citizens of your country ate human slaves that were raised and killed at age 15 for the purpose of eating their flesh. Suppose citizens drank human milk from slave women who were raped every 2 years so that they could produce the maximum amount of milk, and their babies separated from them at birth so that we could drink the milk intended for their babies. (As for an analogy for eggs, maybe these hypothetical people ate some human slave new-born babies because they made for some tasty recipies.) In this hypothetical world, eating slave products is absolutely normal and socially accepted. Suppose that a tiny fraction of people were vegans -- they refrained from eating any human slave products, because they believed that it's wrong to cause suffering to slaves without a moral justification. Taking pleasure in the taste of their flesh or their milk is not a moral justification, because they don't need to eat human slave products in order to survive and be healthy.

Now let me borrow some of your arguments and apply them to this hypothetical world. I will use quotation signs but I will modify some key phrases in your speech to adapt it to the slave world.

"As far as I can tell the fact that many EAs eat human slaves and their products is surprising to some because they think 'human slaves are probably morally relevant' basically implies 'we shouldn't eat human slaves'. To my ear, this sounds about as absurd as…"

"However whether you can trade refraining from eating human slaves and their products for more effective sacrifices is largely a question of whether you choose to do so. And if not eating human slaves is not the most effective way to inconvenience yourself, then it is clear that you should choose to do so. If you eat human slave flesh now in exchange for suffering some more effective annoyance at another time, you and the world can be better off."

"Here is my own calculation of how much it costs to do the same amount of good as replacing one human slave flesh meal with one vegan meal. If you would be willing to pay this much extra to eat human slave flesh for one meal, then you should eat human slave flesh. If not, then you should abstain. For instance, if eating human slave flesh does $10 worth of harm, you should eat human slave flesh whenever you would hypothetically pay an extra $10 for the privilege."

"This gives us a price of $0.0003 with the Humane League[…]. These are not price differences that will change my meal choices very often! I think I would often be willing to pay at least a couple of extra dollars to eat human slave flesh, setting aside human slave suffering."

Of course, if they were human slaves, you wouldn't talk lightly about the suffering and death you cause them when you pay someone to raise them for food, and you wouldn't talk about "a more effective way to inconvenience yourself [than to avoid eating them]." It would be immoral. But in our speciesist culture, we are able to talk lightly about the suffering and death that we cause non-human animals. It is no less immoral. By this I'm not saying you or any other non-vegan are a bad person. It's the behavior that is wrong, the person is just a human being doing the best they can with what they have. And the specisist culture makes it particularly hard to see the behavior as wrong. It was my attempt through a human slave analogy to help you see through the specisism.

Are human slaves the same as non-human animals? They are not the same, but that's not the relevant question. The relevant question is, "do human slaves deserve the same moral consideration as non-human animals?" Animals deserve equal consideration for their interests in not suffering and continuing to live as humans do, because they are equally capable of experiencing pain as humans are and are equally interested in avoiding death. I'm sure you have many justifications for eating animals or their products just as I had until recently. This page was a valuable resource for me for seeing through those excuses I had: Eating Animals: Addressing Our Most Common Justifications

As Stijn commented before, you wouldn't think that donating enough so that someone else saved a life would justify you in killing a person you really dislike. One day we'll look at raising animals for food the way we now look at keeping slaves for labour.

I invite you to consider veganism as an opportunity to lead a happy and healthy life that's more ethical. It won't be a sacrifice for more than a tiny fraction of the rest of your life.

Disclaimer: Even though I've been almost vegan for 8 years I've only recently seen my old speciesist views for what they were and stopped all intake of animal products.

I don't follow the logic of the argument, but at first sight it seems scary. Suppose a really hate my ex-girlfriend. In fact, I hate her so much that I want to kill her. I am even willing to pay $6000 to an assassin to do the job. But instead I kill her myself and give the 6000 dollars to SCI to save a life. (I can even steal all her money after I killed her and give it away to effective charities) "If you would happily pay this much (in my case, $6000) to kill someone, you probably shouldn't abstain from killing that person." If this is how effective altruists would defend their meat consumption, it will discredit the whole idea of effective altruism.

If The Humane League can convert people to vegetarianism for anything like the amounts estimated, and people who find vegetarianism particularly difficult and unpleasant would rather pay to convert someone else than go vegetarianism themselves, then isn't this the best option? It certainly seems to beat haranguing people who find vegetarianism too difficult, which only causes bad feelings on all sides. I've heard some prominent EAA group people advocate this sort of 'vegetarian offsetting'.

"The real question is not whether the cost to you is small, but whether you could do more good for the same small cost."

From what I gather, the "cost" you are referring too is the cost of forgoing the perceived personal benefit/pleasure of eating meat on a per-occasion basis. However, eating a diet with no animal products or much less meat gets a lot easier over time - and the preference flips. Which is why I don't think the social cost on a per-meal basis is really that useful.

Also, my perception is that diets that limit or avoid animal foods are driven by a combination of three reasons: 1) concern for animal suffering 2) environmental harm from most meat production 3) health benefits from eating less meat or certain particularly harmful meats. These reasons all provide a benefit of some sort compared to the standard western diet, and the later two aren't considered here. From my experience, the difficulty of changing my diet to eating a lot less meat was trivial compared to the benefits it brought - especially nutrition knowledge and cooking experience. I eat animal foods on occasion now, but it's from sources that are at the boundary questions of animal ethics - non-sentient animals (scallops), scavenged foods (freeganism), hunted meat, farm animals not explicitly raised for the purpose of meat consumption, etc. Limited animal foods on occasion can provide most of the nutrition benefit, while averting most of the animal suffering.

First I’d like to comment on “this may be hypocritical or otherwise dubious.” To me hypocrisy doesn’t seem morally relevant in itself. In outreach of course others are going to use this factor as a quick-and-dirty heuristic for assessing the feasibility of your proposed way of life, but if you donate to Animal Equality to turn others into vegetarians, they never get to know you.

I’ve recommended to people who didn’t want to become vegetarians that they compensate the harm by donating to a top ACE charity. ACE estimates that a vegetarian saves about 35–144 animals from lives as farmed animals per year, so around 90 maybe, for the sake of simplicity. It also estimates that the top charities save somewhere between 1,000 to 10,000 animals from such life-long torture for $1,000, so $.1 to $1 per animal. Since ACE’s estimates are very rough, as ACE details itself, the interventions will usually become more expensive they are successful, and I’m not sure if suffering as a result of egg consumption is already included, I have advised donations in the area of $100 per year to one of the top charities. My trust in such cost-effectiveness estimates is such that I would rather err even higher.

Counterfactually speaking, there is also the harm in not influencing some of your peers to consume less meat, which you have to offset, so significantly more than a $100 donation is probably called for.

Hypocrisy aside (again), I find it intuitive that when a product is very cheap/cost-effective, like animal welfare, we should buy as much as possible of it instead of producing it ourselves. In fact the low price makes it an extremely attractive buy at the moment, which might soon change as more people become vegetarian. (This seems to be related to moral trade and our spiffy new impact certificates.)

On the other hand, this trade-off doesn’t apply to me—and probably not to many others either—as I’ve found vegetarianism to be just about zero effort and probably negative cost from the start. I’ve recently started supplementing creatine, but it’s €11 for €500 g, so at 5 g per day, it’s 11 cents per day. I would guess that this is still offset by my savings due to my not buying expensive meat.

Moreover there is something like the paradox of voting at work here where a tremendous advantage for everyone (democracy or animal welfare) is only achievable when a majority of people do something that to each of them in isolation would not seem cost-effective. Animal welfare may have a greater elasticity than democracy, but seeing how many people in my culture find it inappropriate to eat dogs or even consenting humans, there is probably some critical mass that only needs to be reached in order to establish vegetarianism as the norm. The cost-effectiveness of this factor is probably hard to estimate, like with scientific research.

I’m eliding a number more very convincing arguments for vegetarianism because they were already explained in other comments.

I've just read through the comments on meteuphoric.

I think arguments about the knock-on effects of vegetarianism/veganism are irrelevant if the charity you believe is the most effective happens to be a vegan outreach charity. The same multiplier would apply to both sides of the comparison.

I think I'm supportive of the case that pain is greater in magnitude than 1 QALY/year. How bad we view pain must surely be anchored to how motivated we are to avoid it. In the ancestral environment, if you're injured do you experience maximal pain for substantially less time on average than it reduces your lifespan? If so I'd expect us to experience a normal year as good and a year of pain as very, very bad.

I agree that the important factor is reducing meat rather than eliminating it entirely. Eliminating that last percent might be quite costly and not worth the "I'm 100% meat free" signalling points.

I didn't know about creatine. That sounds like important information.

I agree about inconvenience budgets being tricky. Avoiding meat could be a good way of building up your tolerance to inconvenience (although admittedly it's not usually marketed that way). It's a good Schelling point (allowing free choice over which inconvenient thing you choose allows you to choose the least actually inconvenient one), and there are social supports for it.

Copy/pasted from Facebook, so please forgive the casual language. A lot of other comments brought up a lot of other issues as well:

I have many issues with the reasoning presented in the article. For example, it's right to consider the potential damage of creatine deficiency, but improper to fail to consider all the potential health benefits that outweigh these potential damages. There are tons of other benefits that the article ignores, like the signalling and idea-spreading benefits of veg*nism.

And one claim that struck me as particularly wild is the assumption that "free range chickens have lives that are at least neutral." Free range chickens live absolutely horrible lives. Here's some of the least gruesome footage (Edit: Forgive my vagueness. Clearly there is footage online of happy chickens. I meant realistic footage of chickens in industrial agriculture.) I can find. Note that's of a "Certified Humane" farm, which is a more stringent qualification than free range.

Also, the whole concept of, "Only perform an action if you it's worth the monetary-equivalent cost to you," seems antithetical, or at least orthogonal, to the concept of effective altruism. If eating animals is worth a few dollars to you, that's probably just selfishness rather than a more cost-effective alternative. The proper EA argument would be that veg*nism causes damage to productivity that outweighs its benefits, which I think is unjustified, but could at least work theoretically.

These are just a few of the many issues I see in the reasoning.

Cautious commenting because my failure to understand you is difficult to phrase in a way that does not sound like a troll

But by - moral value of small animals = 0.05 do you mean you would divert a trolley problem to kill a human if it would save significantly more than 20 otherwise doomed chickens?

Or less gotchay - that you if GW rated chicken saving charities that could reliably save a chicken life for $10 and a human life for $250 you would donate your $250 seeking to do the most good to the chicken saving charity?