Let $X= the cost to me of being a vegetarian. I’m indifferent between donating $X to the best charity I can find or being a vegetarian. For what values of $X would you advise me to become a vegetarian assuming that if I don’t become a vegetarian I really will donate an extra $X to, say, MIRI?
Being a vegetarian does not have a positive monetary cost, unless it makes you so unhappy that you find yourself less motivated at work and therefore earn less money or some such. Meat may be heavily subsidized in the US, but it’s still expensive compared to other foods.
I would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Consequently, if my donating $8,000 to a charity would do more good for the rest of the world than my becoming a vegetarian would, it’s socially inefficient for me to become a vegetarian.
You can make a precommitment to do only one or the other, but if you become vegetarian you don’t actually lose the $8,000 and become unable to give it to MIRI. In this sense it is not a true tradeoff unless happiness and income are easily interconvertible for you.
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).
Let $X= the cost to me of being a vegetarian. I’m indifferent between donating $X to the best charity I can find or being a vegetarian. For what values of $X would you advise me to become a vegetarian assuming that if I don’t become a vegetarian I really will donate an extra $X to, say, MIRI?
Being a vegetarian does not have a positive monetary cost, unless it makes you so unhappy that you find yourself less motivated at work and therefore earn less money or some such. Meat may be heavily subsidized in the US, but it’s still expensive compared to other foods.
I would rather pay $8,000 a year than be a vegetarian. Consequently, if my donating $8,000 to a charity would do more good for the rest of the world than my becoming a vegetarian would, it’s socially inefficient for me to become a vegetarian.
You can make a precommitment to do only one or the other, but if you become vegetarian you don’t actually lose the $8,000 and become unable to give it to MIRI. In this sense it is not a true tradeoff unless happiness and income are easily interconvertible for you.
I have a limited desire to incur costs to help sentients who are neither my friends nor family. This limited desire creates a “true tradeoff”.
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).