Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Plant-based diets also require lots of intense agriculture, which destroys local ecosystems and inadvertently kills millions of mice, other small vertebrates and insects.
It doesn’t seem correct to disregard all of these as “massively outweighed by career/donation choices”. Nor does it seem wise to pick one of these areas (animal suffering in meat production) and treat it as the one and only lifestyle choice a True Rational ought to make.
The problems mentioned above are gigantic. How do we provide everybody with comfortable, affordable existences without destroying the climate or exploiting workers anywhere? How do we produce food for billions of humans without destroying ecosystems and harming other living beings, even indirectly and inadvertently? We’ll get there eventually, and we’re improving every year. But converting to vegetarianism for purposes of virtue signalling, doesn’t seem to be very helpful there.
Of course, if you truly reduce or stop your meat consumption for legitimate reasons of harm reduction, that’s awesome and I’ll applaud anybody for that. Just as reducing your energy consumption and looking for products produced by companies that treat their employees responsibly are probably also virtuous actions. But they shouldn’t become litmus tests.
Our entire way of life is full of negative externalities that cause massive amounts of direct or indirect suffering and harm. Nearly all forms of production and transportation require large amounts of energy, which is often generated in a way that at minimum harms the climate. Your smartphone was probably assembled in a Chinese factory full of third world workers with a barely tolerable existence. It might have passed through an Amazon warehouse where workers have long mind-numbing shifts that also cause physical problems, contributing to the opioid epidemic. Plant-based diets also require lots of intense agriculture, which destroys local ecosystems and inadvertently kills millions of mice, other small vertebrates and insects.
It doesn’t seem correct to disregard all of these as “massively outweighed by career/donation choices”. Nor does it seem wise to pick one of these areas (animal suffering in meat production) and treat it as the one and only lifestyle choice a True Rational ought to make.
The problems mentioned above are gigantic. How do we provide everybody with comfortable, affordable existences without destroying the climate or exploiting workers anywhere? How do we produce food for billions of humans without destroying ecosystems and harming other living beings, even indirectly and inadvertently? We’ll get there eventually, and we’re improving every year. But converting to vegetarianism for purposes of virtue signalling, doesn’t seem to be very helpful there.
Of course, if you truly reduce or stop your meat consumption for legitimate reasons of harm reduction, that’s awesome and I’ll applaud anybody for that. Just as reducing your energy consumption and looking for products produced by companies that treat their employees responsibly are probably also virtuous actions. But they shouldn’t become litmus tests.