I fight the hypothetical—there is no such tradeoff.
A more concrete hypothetical: Suppose that every morning when you wake up you’re presented with a button. If you press the button, an animal will be tortured for three days, but you can eat whatever you want that day. If you don’t press the button, there’s no torture, but you can’t eat meat. By the estimates in this paper, that’s essentially the choice we all make every day (3:1 ratio taken by a_m times l_m = at least 1000 animal-days of suffering avoided per year of vegetarianism ~= 3 days of torture per day of vegetarianism).
Anyway—you should not be a vegetarian iff you would press the button every day.
This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).
I fight the hypothetical—there is no such tradeoff.
A more concrete hypothetical: Suppose that every morning when you wake up you’re presented with a button. If you press the button, an animal will be tortured for three days, but you can eat whatever you want that day. If you don’t press the button, there’s no torture, but you can’t eat meat. By the estimates in this paper, that’s essentially the choice we all make every day (3:1 ratio taken by a_m times l_m = at least 1000 animal-days of suffering avoided per year of vegetarianism ~= 3 days of torture per day of vegetarianism).
Anyway—you should not be a vegetarian iff you would press the button every day.
This is absurd. I really, really would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Do you think I’m lying or don’t understand my own preferences? (I’m an economist and so understand money and tradeoffs and I’m on a paleo diet and so understand my desire for meat.)
I would rather live in a world in which I donate $8,000 a year to MIRI and press the button to one in which I’m a vegetarian and donate nothing to charity.
There is no market for your proposed trade. In this case using money as a proxy for utility/preference doesn’t net you any insight because you can’t exchange vegetarianism or animal-years-of-torture for anything else. Of course you can convert to dollars if you really want to, but you have to convert both sides—how much would you have to be paid to allow an animal to be tortured for three days? (This is equivalent to the original question, we’ve just gone through some unnecessary conversions).