Epistemic Status: Shower thoughts on how to tweak our unconscious habits to be significantly more impactful
Summary: We have various habits that allow us to consistently make better decisions without thinking. In this post, I argue that we should look for more impactful ones and suggest one in particular that I like.
Disclaimer: I'm a vegetarian who doesn't eat eggs. Also, I did no prior research before writing this post and wrote it in less than an hour. My point isn't that being a vegetarian/vegan is bad or stupid, only that we should look for better and more impactful habits to live our lives by.
Moral assumptions I hold (although some might not be necessary for my argument to work): Consequentialism, hedonic utilitarianism, no speciesism, harmful action is equally as bad as harmful inaction
I'm a vegetarian who likes boba. If it's worth the personal cost for me to eat a vegetarian meal to reduce animal suffering slightly, and it's worth the personal cost for me to buy boba instead of donating enough to SWP to save 80,000 shrimp from suffering, then I could be money pumped like this:
In the end, I'm left with no animal welfare benefits, a smaller vegetarian meal, and 2 grains of rice, which might as well be a rounding error.
I'm willing to sacrifice the animal welfare gains from eating a vegetarian meal in exchange for basically nothing. So, either my preferences are irrational, I should stop enjoying small luxuries completely, or the benefit I receive from being a vegetarian is something other than direct animal welfare gains.
Aside from the social signalling/anti-value drift benefits, I think that vegetarianism functions as a "moral heuristic" that allows me to consistently do some amount of good when I otherwise might not. A moral heuristic is what I call a mental shortcut we use to make better moral decisions quickly. It's annoying to think about optimization constantly, but as a vegetarian, I can just let System 1 take over when I eat my meals by defaulting to the plant-based options. This is probably sub-optimal in many ways, but it increases the amount of good I do in the real world. Still, it seems inefficient: donating to SWP is clearly more impactful than vegetarianism.[1] How can we design more impactful moral heuristics?
A good moral heuristic allows you to make good decisions quickly and with little thought. At the margin, they can probably be pressed to demonstrate an irrational preference, but generally, they do real-world good. Here are some examples of what I consider moral heuristics:
All of these are generally seen as virtuous, require little thought to do, and can probably be shown to be sub-optimal in some way. However, by frequently presenting themselves to people, they motivate people to do good persistently.[2] Of course, not all moral heuristics are created equal in terms of their impact and sacrifice.
My ideal moral heuristic would be impactful, easy to maintain, and resolve the money pump that I created before.
I think an easy (and more impactful) moral heuristic would be a self-imposed tax on the luxury goods I purchase, like boba. This tax money would then be donated to various effective charities. In a purely efficiency-maximizing sense, this probably isn't perfectly optimal. However, it softens my money pump (assuming that I can't buy boba without paying this tax, and that I realistically would not use the money I save on not buying boba to donate, which is true), forces me to do more good, and makes me feel a little more internally consistent.
Image by GPT 5.2
I don't know. Something less than 50%, but more than 5%. For the next month, I'll try taxing myself at 20% to see how that goes. I'm not sure how to calculate an optimal number, as most taxes aren't really designed with this type of thing in mind. I'll pay these taxes at the end of every month to minimize transaction fees and annoyance.
I think the efficiency/impact of this tax system probably outweighs the tiny amount of inefficiency created in my spending habits due to DWL.
Presumably, we all have a maximum willingness-to-sacrifice that, when exceeded, causes us to "burn out" and give less. If you can be a vegetarian, take GWWC, and do this, that's great! However, if you have to choose between adopting a personal luxury good tax at a rate of 5% and abstaining from animal products entirely, I would say that you should take on the tax. It still seems good to choose beef over chicken when given the choice, though.
Edit: Tweaked the title and summary to better align with the content I wrote about.
Abstaining from eating 100 shrimp helps some number fewer than 100 shrimp in expectation (due to complications with elasticities), while giving a dollar to the SWP helps A LOT more shrimp and is probably easier.
All of these things also send valuable social signals to other people. I'm not sure how relevant that is to our current dilemma, though.
Thanks for writing. I'm with you on the idea of a self-imposed tax - seems like a reasonable idea for those who can do it and certainly the impact of donating can be more impactful than many other actions we can take. However, I don't know if we can discount the gains that veganism (I'll use veganism as it's a lot more straightforward) makes so quickly. I know you've said that veganism isn't bad or stupid, but that it's not as impactful as other things we could do, so I'm keeping that in mind. I'm only thinking out loud here based on my intuition, so let's see if this makes sense.
Veganism - as you know - is a philosophy against the exploitation of animals, based on ideas around animal sentience and the moral status of animals. Here are some thought that come to me based on that definition and your argument here:
Those are just some initial thoughts that make me feel like the first step in your money pump argument ('I give up one animal product-based meal in exchange for a less filling, vegetarian meal, which results in a slightly higher expected quality of life for some animals') might be more like 'I give up one animal product-based meal in exchange for a vegan meal (it surely doesn't need to be less filling) which contributes to a stronger, more influential movement against animal exploitation'. Perhaps the extent to which this is true depends on the context in which you're eating.
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts!
Thanks for your response! These are thoughtful points.
I'll need to think more about the marginal impact of being a member of a movement like the vegan one. You raise some good points, and upon reflection, I remember that the vegans in my life have certainly inspired my actions at least a little bit. These are benefits that I am wrong to discount too much.
I think the step in my money pump argument that bothers me the most is choosing to buy a boba over donating to an effective charity, because it doesn't seem in line with how I make my other decisions. I would really like my preferences to be transitive, as it makes me feel less hypocritical.
Perhaps the way I think about this is very abstracted away from how real people think about their choices, but I would argue that small charitable donations are less costly to many people than the choice to give up meat. On many restaurant menus, you can find a section that says something along the lines of "add chicken/beef/pork to this for $1.99" or something along those lines. Or maybe a menu will have something like "spaghetti and marinara sauce: $7.99; spaghetti and meatballs: $9.99." The existence of these items at these prices implies that the value of giving up meat in these circumstances is worth at least $2 to some people (they would rather have the meat than have those $2). So, based on people's revealed preferences through pricing, I think veganism is probably more costly to people than explicitly spending small amounts of money. Perhaps there is something to be said about the effort of going out of your way to donate, but in my experience, the process is quite painless.
I think you're right about the reality of how people weigh up giving up meat vs donating. Many people would rather sacrifice a small amount of money than give up meat (as shown in your example). I suppose the best that we can do, in terms of advocacy, is encouraging people to do both or, failing that, one or the other. On paper, it's possible that donating could look more impactful, but it can be hard to accurately summarise the impact of a social movement in numbers, especially when it's still quite early days.