I personally became vegetarian after being annoyed that vegans weren’t truth-seeking (like most groups of people, tbc). But I can totally see why others would be turned off from veganism completely after being lied to (even if people spread nutrition misinformation about whatever meat-eating diet they are on too).
I became vegetarian even though I stopped trusting what vegans said about nutrition and did my own research. Luckily that’s something I was interested in because I wouldn’t expect others to bother reading papers and such for having healthy diet.
(Note: I’m now considering eating meat again, but only ethical farms and game meat because I now believe those lives are good, I’m really only against some forms of factory farming. But this kind of discussion is hard to have with other veg^ns.)
Yes and no. No because I figured most of the reduction in suffering came from not eating meat and eggs (I stopped eating eggs even tho most vegetarians do). So I felt it was a good spot to land and not be too much effort for me.
Ah okay cool, so you have a certain threshold for harm and just don’t consume anything above that. I’ve found this approach really interesting and have recommended others against because I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
I’m not sure why you’d think it’s less sustainable than veganism. In my mind, it’s effective because it is sustainable and reduces most of the suffering. Just like how EA tries to be effective (and sustainable) by not telling people to donate massive amounts of their income (just a small-ish percentage that works for them to the most effective charities), I see my approach as the same. It’s the sweet-spot between reducing suffering and sustainability (for me).
See below if you’d like an in depth look at my way of thinking, but I defiantly see the analogy and suppose I just think of it a bit differently myself. Can I ask how long you’ve been vegetarian? And how you’ve come to the decision as to which animals lives you think are net positive?
5 and half years. Didn’t do it sooner because I was concerned about nutrition and don’t trust vegans/vegetarians to give truthful advice. I used various statistics on number of deaths, adjusted for sentience, and more. Looked at articles like this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9067651/eggs-chicken-effective-altruism
Yeah sure. I would need a full post to explain myself, but basically I think that what seems to be really important when going vegan is standing in a certain sort of loving relationship to animals, one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
I guess the first time I thought about this was with my university EA group. We had a couple of hardcore utilitarians, and one of them brought up an interesting idea one night. He was a vegan, but he’d been offered some mac and cheese, and in similar thinking to above (that dairy generally involves less suffering than eggs or chicken for ex) he wondered if it might actually be better to take the mac and donate the money he would have spent to an animal welfare org. And when he roughed up the math, sure enough, taking the mac and donating was somewhat significantly the better option.
But he didn’t do it, nor do I think he changed how he acted in the future. Why? I think it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand that isn’t veganism that stays stable over time. For those who’ve reverted, I’ve seen time and again a slow path back, one where it starts with the less bad items, cheese is quite frequent, and then naturally over time one thing after another is added to the point that most wind up in some sort of reduceitarian state where they’re maybe 80% back to normal (I also want to note here, I’m so glad for any change, and I cast no stones at anyone trying their best to change). And I guess maybe at some point it stops being a moral thing, or becomes some really watered down moral thing like how much people consider the environment when booking a plane ticket.
I don’t know if this helps make it clear, but it’s like how most people feel about harm to younger kids. When it comes to just about any serious harm to younger kids, people are generally against it, like super against it, a feeling of deep caring that to me seems to be one of the strongest sentiments shared by humans universally. People will give you some reasons for this i.e. “they are helpless and we are in a position of responsibility to help them” but really it seems to ground pretty quickly in a sentiment of “it’s just bad”.
To have this sort of love, this commitment to preventing suffering, with animals to me means pretty much just drawing the line at sentient beings and trying to cultivate a basic sense that they matter and that “it’s just bad” to eat them. Sure, I’m not sure what to do about insects, and wild animal welfare is tricky, so it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it seem. And it’s not that I don’t want to have any idea of some of the numbers and research behind it all, I know I need to stay up to date on debates on sentience, and I know that I reference relative measures of harm often when I’m trying to guide non-veg people away from the worst harms. But what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale.
And to try to return to earlier, I guess I see taking this sort of position as likely to extend people’s time spent doing veg-related diets, and I think it’s just a lot trickier to have this sort of relationship when you are doing some sort of utilitarian calculus of what is and isn’t above the bar for you (again, much love to these people, something is always so much better than nothing). This is largely just a theory, I don’t have much to back it up, and it would seem to explain some cases of reversion I’ve seen but certainly not all, and I also feel like this is a bit sloppy because I’d really need a post to get at this hard to describe feeling I have. But hopefully this helps explain the viewpoint a bit better, happy to answer any questions :)
Thank you. This was educational for me, and also just beautifully put.
I have two responses, one on practicalities and one on moral philosophy. My guess is the practical issues aren’t your cruxes, so I’m going to put those aside for now to focus on the moral issue.
you say:
one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
[...]
what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale
This might be presumptuous, but I think I understand how you feel here, because it is I how I feel about truthseeking. That respect for the truth[1] isn’t just an instrumental tactic towards some greater good, it is the substrate that all good things grow from. If you start trading away truthseeking for short-term benefit you will end up with nothing but ashes, no matter how good the short-term trade looked. And it is scary to me that other people don’t get this, the way I imagine it is scary to you that other people can be surrounded by torture factories and think about them mostly as a source of useful and pleasurable molecules.
I don’t know how to resolve this, because “respect for life” and “respect for truth” are both pretty compelling substrates. I don’t actually know if I’d want to live in a world where truth had decisively won over life and anti-suffering. My gut feeling is that truth world can bootstrap to truth-and-life world easier than life world can, but if someone disagreed I wouldn’t have a good counterargument.
First thanks for your kind words, they were nice to receive :)
But I also think this is wonderfully put, and I think you’re right to point to your feelings on truth as similar. As truth for you, life to me is sacred, and I think I generally build a lot of my world out of that basic fact. I would note that I think one another’s values are likely important for us to, as truth is also really important to me and I value honestly and not lying more than most people I know. And on the flipside I imagine that you value life quite a bit.
But looking at the specific case you imagine, yeah it’s really hard to imagine either totally separate on their own because I find they often lead to one another. I guess one crux for me that might give me doubts on the goodness of the truth world is not being sure on the “whether humans are innately good” question. If they aren’t innately good, then everyone being honest about their intentions and what they want to do may mean places in the world where repression or some sort of suffering is common. I guess the way I imagine it going is having a hard time dealing with the people who honesty just want some version of the world that involves inflicting some sort of harm on others. I imagine that many would likely not want this, and they would make rules as such, but that they’d have a hard time critiquing others in the world far away from themselves if they’ve been perfectly straightforward and honest about where they stand with their values.
But I can easily imagine counterarguments here, and it’s not as if a life where reducing suffering were of utmost importance wouldn’t run the risk of some pretty large deviations from the truth that seem bad (i.e. a vegan government asserting there are zero potentials for negative health effects for going vegan). But then we could get into standard utilitarian responses like “oh well they really should have been going in for something like rule utilitarianism that would have told them this was an awful decision on net” and so on and so forth. Not sure where I come out either really.
Note: I’d love to know what practical response you have, it might not be my crux but could be insightful!
LessWrong is launching Dialogues pretty soon, would you be interested in doing one together? I’m most interested in high level “how do you navigate when two good principles conflict?” than object level vegan questions, but probably that would come up. An unnuanced teaser for this would be “I don’t think a world where humans are Bad as a whole makes sense”.
On a practical level:
I think you speak of veganism as the sustainable shelling point with more certainty than is warranted. How do you know it’s less sustainable, for everyone, than ameliatarianism or reducitarianism? How do you know that the highest EV is pushing veganism-as-ideal harder, rather than socially coordinate around “medical meat”?
I think “no animal products via the mouth” is a much more arbitrary line than is commonly considered, especially if you look at it on purely utilitarian grounds. What about sugar sifted through bones? Why isn’t “no vertebrates” sustainable? What about glue in shoes? What about products produced in factories that use rat poison?
Vegetarianism seems like a terrible compromise shelling point. My understanding is that most eggs are more suffering per calorie or nutrient than beef. But vegetarian is (currently) an easier line than milk-and-beef-but-not-eggs-or-chickens.
I knew a guy who went vegetarian for ethical reasons before learning all of the math. He chose to stay vegetarian after learning how bad eggs were, because he was worried that he couldn’t reconfigure himself a second time and if he tried he’d slide all the way back into eating meat.
When I’ve asked other people about this they answer based on the vegans they knew. But that’s inherently a biased group. It includes current vegans who socialize in animal-focused spaces. Assuming that’s true, why should that apply to vegans who don’t hang out in those spaces, much less omnivores considering reducitarianism?
It’s not obvious to me our protect-at-all-costs attitude towards young children is optimal. I can track a number of costs to society, parents, and the children themselves. And a bunch of harms that still aren’t being prevented.
I suspect you are underestimating the costs of veganism for some people. It sounds like that one guy didn’t value mac and cheese that much, and it was reasonable for him to forego it even if it also would have been easy to buy an offset. But for some people that bowl of mac and cheese is really important, and if you want society as a whole to shift then the default rules need to accommodate that.
Have no idea what it entails but I enjoy conversing and learning more about the world, so I’d happy do a dialogue! Happy to keep it in the clouds too.
But yeah you make a good point. I mean, I’m not convinced what the proper schelling point is, and would eagerly eat up any research on this. Maybe what I think is that for a specific group of people like me (no idea what exactly defines that group) it makes sense, but that generally what’s going to make sense for a person has to be quite tailored to their own situation and traits.
I would push back on the no animal products through the mouth bit. Sure, it happens to include lesser forms of suffering that might be less important than changing other things in the world (and if you assumed that this was zero sum that may be a problem, but I don’t think it is). But generally it focuses on avoiding suffering that you are in control of, in a way that updates in light of new evidence. Vegetarianism in India is great because it leads to less meat consumption, but because it involves specific things to avoid instead of setting a basis as suffering it becomes much harder to convincingly explain why they should update to avoid eggs for example. So yeah, protesting rat poison factories may not be a mainstream vegan thing, but I’d be willing to bet vegans are less apt to use it. And sure, vegans may be divided on what to do about sugar, but I’d be surprised if any said “it doesn’t involved an animal going in my mouth so it’s okay with me”. I don’t think it’s arbitrary but find it rather intentional.
I could continue on here but I’m also realizing some part of you wanted to avoid debates about vegan stuffs, so I’ll let this suffice and explicitly say if you don’t want to respond I fully understand (but would be happy to hear if you do!).
I think an issue is that you are imagining a general factor of truth-seeking which applies regardless of domain, whereas in practice most of the variation you see in truth-seeking is instrumental or ideological and so limited to the specific areas where people draw utility or political interest from truth-seeking.
I think it is possible to create a community that more generally values truth-seeking and that doing so could be very valuable, bootstrapping a great deal more caring and ability by more clearly seeing what’s going on.
However I think by-default it’s not what happens when criticizing others for lack of truth-seeking, and also by-default not what happens among people who pride themselves on truth-seeking and rationality. Instead, my experience is that when I’ve written corrections to one side in a conflict, I’ve gotten support from the opposing side, but when I’ve then turned around and criticized the opposing side, they’ve rapidly turned on me.
Truth-seeking with respect to instrumentally valuable things can gain support from others who desire instrumentally valuable things, and truth-seeking with respect to politically valuable things can gain support from others who have shared political goals. However creating a generally truth-seeking community that extends beyond this requires a bunch of work and research to extend the truth-seeking to other questions. In particular, one has to proactively recognize the associated conflicts and the overlooked questions and make sure one seeks truth in those areas too. (Which sucks! It’s not your specialty, can’t other people do it?? Ideally yes, but they’re not going to do it automatically, so in order for other people to do it, you have to create a community that actually recognizes that it has to be done, and delegates the work of doing it to specific people who will go on and do it.)
I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
Cutting out bird and seafood products (ameliatarianism) is definitely more sustainable for me. I’m very confused why you would think it’s less sustainable than, uh, ‘cold turkey’ veganism. “Just avoid chicken/eggs” (since I don’t like seafood or the other types of bird meat products) is way easier than “avoid all meat, also milk, also cheese”.
My sense is that different people struggle with staying on a suffering-reducing diet for different reasons, and they have different solutions. Some people do need a commitment to a greater principle to make it work, and they typical mind that other people can’t (but aren’t wrong that people tend to overestimate themselves). Some people really need a little bit of animal nutrition but stop when that need is filled, and it’s not a slippery slope for them[1]and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems..
If the general conversation around ethics and nutrition were in a better place, I think it would be useful to look at how much of “veganism as a hard line” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what new equilibriums could be created. Does telling people “if you cross this line once you’ll inevitably slide into full blow carnism” make it more likely? Could advocates create a new hard line that gave people strength but had space for people for whom the trade-offs of total abstention are too hard? Or maybe not-even-once is the best line to hold, and does more good on net even if it drives some people away.
I don’t feel like I can be in that conversation, for a lot of reasons. But I hope it happens
I think the first paragraph is well put, and do agree that my camp is likely more apt to be evangelical. But I also want to say that I don’t think the second paragraph is quite representative. I know approximately 0 vegans that support the “cross the line once” philosophy. I think the current status quo is something much closer to what you imagine in the second to last sentence, where the recommendation that’s most often come to me is “look, as long as you are really thinking about it and trying to do what’s best not just for you but for the animals as well, that’s all it takes. We all have weak moments and veganism doesn’t mean perfection, it’s just doing the best with what you’ve got”[1]
Sure, there are some obvious caveats here like you can’t be a vegan if you haven’t significantly reduced your consumption of animals/animal products. Joe, who eats steak every night and starts every morning with eggs and cheese and a nice hearty glass of dairy milk won’t really be a vegan even if he claims the title. But I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets, generally I think they’re happy to just have some more people on board.
I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets,
I have seen a lot of stones cast about this. I’d believe that the 50th percentile vegan doesn’t, but in practice the ones who care a lot are the ones potential reducitarians hear from.
Sure, sure. I’m not saying there isn’t perhaps an extreme wing, I just think it’s quite important to say this isn’t the average, and highlight that the majority of vegans have a view more like the one I mentioned above.
I think this is a distinction worth making, because when you collapse everyone into one camp, you begin to alienate the majority that actually more or less agrees with you. I don’t know what the term for the group you’re talking about is, but maybe evangelical vegans isn’t a bad term to use for now.
While I think the environmental sustainability angle is also an active thing to think about here (because beef potentially involves less suffering for the animals, but relatively more harm to the environment), I did actually intend sustainability in the spirit of “able to stick with it for a long period of time” or something like that. Probably could have been clearer.
What Elizabeth had to say here is broadly right. See my comment above, for some more in depth reasoning as to why I think the opposite may be true, but basically I think that the sort of loving relationship formed with other animals that I imagine as the thing that holds together commitment over a long period of time, over a large range of hard circumstances, is tricky to create when you don’t go full on. I have no idea what’s sustainable for you though, and want to emphasize that whatever works to reduce is something I’m happy with, so I’m quite glad for your ameliatarian addition.
I’m also trying to update my views here, so can I ask for how long you’ve been on a veg diet? And if you predict any changes in the near future?
Is this just acknowledging some sort of monkey brain thing, or endorsing it as well? (If part of it is acknowledging it, then kudos. I appreciate the honesty and bravery. I also think the data point is relevant to what is discussed in the post.)
I ask because it strikes me as a Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence sort of thing. If Hitler thinks the sky is green, well, he’s wrong, but it isn’t really relevant to the question of what color the sky actually is.
The first paragraph doesn’t include jacquesthibs’s original state before becoming vegetarian, leaving some ambiguity. I think you’re parsing it as “I went from vegan to vegetarian because I stopped trusting vegans”. The other parsing is “I went from omnivore to vegetarian, despite not trusting vegans, because I did my own research.” The rest of the comment makes me fairly confident that the second parsing is correct; but certainly it would be easier to follow if it were stated upfront.
Sorry, I assumed it was obvious we were talking about omnivore to vegan given that Ninety-Three was talking about not being open to becoming vegan if vegans tried to convince them. I do see the ambiguity though.
I mean, to a point; if vegans are your main source of information on veganism and its costs, and you find out a pattern of vegans being untrustworthy, this means you’re left to navigate veganism alone, which is itself a cost and a risk. Having a supportive community that you can trust makes a big difference in how easy it is to stick to big lifestyle decisions.
I personally became vegetarian after being annoyed that vegans weren’t truth-seeking (like most groups of people, tbc). But I can totally see why others would be turned off from veganism completely after being lied to (even if people spread nutrition misinformation about whatever meat-eating diet they are on too).
I became vegetarian even though I stopped trusting what vegans said about nutrition and did my own research. Luckily that’s something I was interested in because I wouldn’t expect others to bother reading papers and such for having healthy diet.
(Note: I’m now considering eating meat again, but only ethical farms and game meat because I now believe those lives are good, I’m really only against some forms of factory farming. But this kind of discussion is hard to have with other veg^ns.)
Did you go vegetarian because you thought it was specifically healthier than going vegan?
Yes and no. No because I figured most of the reduction in suffering came from not eating meat and eggs (I stopped eating eggs even tho most vegetarians do). So I felt it was a good spot to land and not be too much effort for me.
Ah okay cool, so you have a certain threshold for harm and just don’t consume anything above that. I’ve found this approach really interesting and have recommended others against because I’ve worried about it’s sustainability, but do you think it’s been a good path for you?
I’m not sure why you’d think it’s less sustainable than veganism. In my mind, it’s effective because it is sustainable and reduces most of the suffering. Just like how EA tries to be effective (and sustainable) by not telling people to donate massive amounts of their income (just a small-ish percentage that works for them to the most effective charities), I see my approach as the same. It’s the sweet-spot between reducing suffering and sustainability (for me).
See below if you’d like an in depth look at my way of thinking, but I defiantly see the analogy and suppose I just think of it a bit differently myself. Can I ask how long you’ve been vegetarian? And how you’ve come to the decision as to which animals lives you think are net positive?
5 and half years. Didn’t do it sooner because I was concerned about nutrition and don’t trust vegans/vegetarians to give truthful advice. I used various statistics on number of deaths, adjusted for sentience, and more. Looked at articles like this: https://www.vox.com/2015/7/31/9067651/eggs-chicken-effective-altruism
This argument came up a lot during the facebook debate days, could you say more about why you believe it?
Yeah sure. I would need a full post to explain myself, but basically I think that what seems to be really important when going vegan is standing in a certain sort of loving relationship to animals, one that isn’t grounded in utility but instead a strong (but basic) appreciation and valuing of the other. But let me step back for a minute.
I guess the first time I thought about this was with my university EA group. We had a couple of hardcore utilitarians, and one of them brought up an interesting idea one night. He was a vegan, but he’d been offered some mac and cheese, and in similar thinking to above (that dairy generally involves less suffering than eggs or chicken for ex) he wondered if it might actually be better to take the mac and donate the money he would have spent to an animal welfare org. And when he roughed up the math, sure enough, taking the mac and donating was somewhat significantly the better option.
But he didn’t do it, nor do I think he changed how he acted in the future. Why? I think it’s really hard to draw a line in the sand that isn’t veganism that stays stable over time. For those who’ve reverted, I’ve seen time and again a slow path back, one where it starts with the less bad items, cheese is quite frequent, and then naturally over time one thing after another is added to the point that most wind up in some sort of reduceitarian state where they’re maybe 80% back to normal (I also want to note here, I’m so glad for any change, and I cast no stones at anyone trying their best to change). And I guess maybe at some point it stops being a moral thing, or becomes some really watered down moral thing like how much people consider the environment when booking a plane ticket.
I don’t know if this helps make it clear, but it’s like how most people feel about harm to younger kids. When it comes to just about any serious harm to younger kids, people are generally against it, like super against it, a feeling of deep caring that to me seems to be one of the strongest sentiments shared by humans universally. People will give you some reasons for this i.e. “they are helpless and we are in a position of responsibility to help them” but really it seems to ground pretty quickly in a sentiment of “it’s just bad”.
To have this sort of love, this commitment to preventing suffering, with animals to me means pretty much just drawing the line at sentient beings and trying to cultivate a basic sense that they matter and that “it’s just bad” to eat them. Sure, I’m not sure what to do about insects, and wild animal welfare is tricky, so it’s not nearly as easy as I’m making it seem. And it’s not that I don’t want to have any idea of some of the numbers and research behind it all, I know I need to stay up to date on debates on sentience, and I know that I reference relative measures of harm often when I’m trying to guide non-veg people away from the worst harms. But what I’d love to see one day is a posturing towards eating animals like our posturing towards child abuse, a very basic, loving expression that in some sense refuses the debate on what’s better or worse and just casts it all out as beyond the pale.
And to try to return to earlier, I guess I see taking this sort of position as likely to extend people’s time spent doing veg-related diets, and I think it’s just a lot trickier to have this sort of relationship when you are doing some sort of utilitarian calculus of what is and isn’t above the bar for you (again, much love to these people, something is always so much better than nothing). This is largely just a theory, I don’t have much to back it up, and it would seem to explain some cases of reversion I’ve seen but certainly not all, and I also feel like this is a bit sloppy because I’d really need a post to get at this hard to describe feeling I have. But hopefully this helps explain the viewpoint a bit better, happy to answer any questions :)
Thank you. This was educational for me, and also just beautifully put.
I have two responses, one on practicalities and one on moral philosophy. My guess is the practical issues aren’t your cruxes, so I’m going to put those aside for now to focus on the moral issue.
you say:
This might be presumptuous, but I think I understand how you feel here, because it is I how I feel about truthseeking. That respect for the truth[1] isn’t just an instrumental tactic towards some greater good, it is the substrate that all good things grow from. If you start trading away truthseeking for short-term benefit you will end up with nothing but ashes, no matter how good the short-term trade looked. And it is scary to me that other people don’t get this, the way I imagine it is scary to you that other people can be surrounded by torture factories and think about them mostly as a source of useful and pleasurable molecules.
I don’t know how to resolve this, because “respect for life” and “respect for truth” are both pretty compelling substrates. I don’t actually know if I’d want to live in a world where truth had decisively won over life and anti-suffering. My gut feeling is that truth world can bootstrap to truth-and-life world easier than life world can, but if someone disagreed I wouldn’t have a good counterargument.
except with explicit enemies
First thanks for your kind words, they were nice to receive :)
But I also think this is wonderfully put, and I think you’re right to point to your feelings on truth as similar. As truth for you, life to me is sacred, and I think I generally build a lot of my world out of that basic fact. I would note that I think one another’s values are likely important for us to, as truth is also really important to me and I value honestly and not lying more than most people I know. And on the flipside I imagine that you value life quite a bit.
But looking at the specific case you imagine, yeah it’s really hard to imagine either totally separate on their own because I find they often lead to one another. I guess one crux for me that might give me doubts on the goodness of the truth world is not being sure on the “whether humans are innately good” question. If they aren’t innately good, then everyone being honest about their intentions and what they want to do may mean places in the world where repression or some sort of suffering is common. I guess the way I imagine it going is having a hard time dealing with the people who honesty just want some version of the world that involves inflicting some sort of harm on others. I imagine that many would likely not want this, and they would make rules as such, but that they’d have a hard time critiquing others in the world far away from themselves if they’ve been perfectly straightforward and honest about where they stand with their values.
But I can easily imagine counterarguments here, and it’s not as if a life where reducing suffering were of utmost importance wouldn’t run the risk of some pretty large deviations from the truth that seem bad (i.e. a vegan government asserting there are zero potentials for negative health effects for going vegan). But then we could get into standard utilitarian responses like “oh well they really should have been going in for something like rule utilitarianism that would have told them this was an awful decision on net” and so on and so forth. Not sure where I come out either really.
Note: I’d love to know what practical response you have, it might not be my crux but could be insightful!
LessWrong is launching Dialogues pretty soon, would you be interested in doing one together? I’m most interested in high level “how do you navigate when two good principles conflict?” than object level vegan questions, but probably that would come up. An unnuanced teaser for this would be “I don’t think a world where humans are Bad as a whole makes sense”.
On a practical level:
I think you speak of veganism as the sustainable shelling point with more certainty than is warranted. How do you know it’s less sustainable, for everyone, than ameliatarianism or reducitarianism? How do you know that the highest EV is pushing veganism-as-ideal harder, rather than socially coordinate around “medical meat”?
I think “no animal products via the mouth” is a much more arbitrary line than is commonly considered, especially if you look at it on purely utilitarian grounds. What about sugar sifted through bones? Why isn’t “no vertebrates” sustainable? What about glue in shoes? What about products produced in factories that use rat poison?
Vegetarianism seems like a terrible compromise shelling point. My understanding is that most eggs are more suffering per calorie or nutrient than beef. But vegetarian is (currently) an easier line than milk-and-beef-but-not-eggs-or-chickens.
I knew a guy who went vegetarian for ethical reasons before learning all of the math. He chose to stay vegetarian after learning how bad eggs were, because he was worried that he couldn’t reconfigure himself a second time and if he tried he’d slide all the way back into eating meat.
When I’ve asked other people about this they answer based on the vegans they knew. But that’s inherently a biased group. It includes current vegans who socialize in animal-focused spaces. Assuming that’s true, why should that apply to vegans who don’t hang out in those spaces, much less omnivores considering reducitarianism?
It’s not obvious to me our protect-at-all-costs attitude towards young children is optimal. I can track a number of costs to society, parents, and the children themselves. And a bunch of harms that still aren’t being prevented.
I suspect you are underestimating the costs of veganism for some people. It sounds like that one guy didn’t value mac and cheese that much, and it was reasonable for him to forego it even if it also would have been easy to buy an offset. But for some people that bowl of mac and cheese is really important, and if you want society as a whole to shift then the default rules need to accommodate that.
Dialogues are launched now!
Have no idea what it entails but I enjoy conversing and learning more about the world, so I’d happy do a dialogue! Happy to keep it in the clouds too.
But yeah you make a good point. I mean, I’m not convinced what the proper schelling point is, and would eagerly eat up any research on this. Maybe what I think is that for a specific group of people like me (no idea what exactly defines that group) it makes sense, but that generally what’s going to make sense for a person has to be quite tailored to their own situation and traits.
I would push back on the no animal products through the mouth bit. Sure, it happens to include lesser forms of suffering that might be less important than changing other things in the world (and if you assumed that this was zero sum that may be a problem, but I don’t think it is). But generally it focuses on avoiding suffering that you are in control of, in a way that updates in light of new evidence. Vegetarianism in India is great because it leads to less meat consumption, but because it involves specific things to avoid instead of setting a basis as suffering it becomes much harder to convincingly explain why they should update to avoid eggs for example. So yeah, protesting rat poison factories may not be a mainstream vegan thing, but I’d be willing to bet vegans are less apt to use it. And sure, vegans may be divided on what to do about sugar, but I’d be surprised if any said “it doesn’t involved an animal going in my mouth so it’s okay with me”. I don’t think it’s arbitrary but find it rather intentional.
I could continue on here but I’m also realizing some part of you wanted to avoid debates about vegan stuffs, so I’ll let this suffice and explicitly say if you don’t want to respond I fully understand (but would be happy to hear if you do!).
I’d be happy to join a dialogue about this.
I think an issue is that you are imagining a general factor of truth-seeking which applies regardless of domain, whereas in practice most of the variation you see in truth-seeking is instrumental or ideological and so limited to the specific areas where people draw utility or political interest from truth-seeking.
I think it is possible to create a community that more generally values truth-seeking and that doing so could be very valuable, bootstrapping a great deal more caring and ability by more clearly seeing what’s going on.
However I think by-default it’s not what happens when criticizing others for lack of truth-seeking, and also by-default not what happens among people who pride themselves on truth-seeking and rationality. Instead, my experience is that when I’ve written corrections to one side in a conflict, I’ve gotten support from the opposing side, but when I’ve then turned around and criticized the opposing side, they’ve rapidly turned on me.
Truth-seeking with respect to instrumentally valuable things can gain support from others who desire instrumentally valuable things, and truth-seeking with respect to politically valuable things can gain support from others who have shared political goals. However creating a generally truth-seeking community that extends beyond this requires a bunch of work and research to extend the truth-seeking to other questions. In particular, one has to proactively recognize the associated conflicts and the overlooked questions and make sure one seeks truth in those areas too. (Which sucks! It’s not your specialty, can’t other people do it?? Ideally yes, but they’re not going to do it automatically, so in order for other people to do it, you have to create a community that actually recognizes that it has to be done, and delegates the work of doing it to specific people who will go on and do it.)
Cutting out bird and seafood products (ameliatarianism) is definitely more sustainable for me. I’m very confused why you would think it’s less sustainable than, uh, ‘cold turkey’ veganism. “Just avoid chicken/eggs” (since I don’t like seafood or the other types of bird meat products) is way easier than “avoid all meat, also milk, also cheese”.
My sense is that different people struggle with staying on a suffering-reducing diet for different reasons, and they have different solutions. Some people do need a commitment to a greater principle to make it work, and they typical mind that other people can’t (but aren’t wrong that people tend to overestimate themselves). Some people really need a little bit of animal nutrition but stop when that need is filled, and it’s not a slippery slope for them[1]and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems..
If the general conversation around ethics and nutrition were in a better place, I think it would be useful to look at how much of “veganism as a hard line” is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and what new equilibriums could be created. Does telling people “if you cross this line once you’ll inevitably slide into full blow carnism” make it more likely? Could advocates create a new hard line that gave people strength but had space for people for whom the trade-offs of total abstention are too hard? Or maybe not-even-once is the best line to hold, and does more good on net even if it drives some people away.
I don’t feel like I can be in that conversation, for a lot of reasons. But I hope it happens
and maybe miss that other people can’t stop where they can, although this group tends to be less evangelical so it causes fewer problems.
I think the first paragraph is well put, and do agree that my camp is likely more apt to be evangelical. But I also want to say that I don’t think the second paragraph is quite representative. I know approximately 0 vegans that support the “cross the line once” philosophy. I think the current status quo is something much closer to what you imagine in the second to last sentence, where the recommendation that’s most often come to me is “look, as long as you are really thinking about it and trying to do what’s best not just for you but for the animals as well, that’s all it takes. We all have weak moments and veganism doesn’t mean perfection, it’s just doing the best with what you’ve got”[1]
Sure, there are some obvious caveats here like you can’t be a vegan if you haven’t significantly reduced your consumption of animals/animal products. Joe, who eats steak every night and starts every morning with eggs and cheese and a nice hearty glass of dairy milk won’t really be a vegan even if he claims the title. But I don’t see the average vegan casting stones at and of the various partial reduction diets, generally I think they’re happy to just have some more people on board.
I have seen a lot of stones cast about this. I’d believe that the 50th percentile vegan doesn’t, but in practice the ones who care a lot are the ones potential reducitarians hear from.
Sure, sure. I’m not saying there isn’t perhaps an extreme wing, I just think it’s quite important to say this isn’t the average, and highlight that the majority of vegans have a view more like the one I mentioned above.
I think this is a distinction worth making, because when you collapse everyone into one camp, you begin to alienate the majority that actually more or less agrees with you. I don’t know what the term for the group you’re talking about is, but maybe evangelical vegans isn’t a bad term to use for now.
I took Tristan to be using “sustainability” in the sense of “lessened environmental impact”, not “requiring little willpower”
While I think the environmental sustainability angle is also an active thing to think about here (because beef potentially involves less suffering for the animals, but relatively more harm to the environment), I did actually intend sustainability in the spirit of “able to stick with it for a long period of time” or something like that. Probably could have been clearer.
What Elizabeth had to say here is broadly right. See my comment above, for some more in depth reasoning as to why I think the opposite may be true, but basically I think that the sort of loving relationship formed with other animals that I imagine as the thing that holds together commitment over a long period of time, over a large range of hard circumstances, is tricky to create when you don’t go full on. I have no idea what’s sustainable for you though, and want to emphasize that whatever works to reduce is something I’m happy with, so I’m quite glad for your ameliatarian addition.
I’m also trying to update my views here, so can I ask for how long you’ve been on a veg diet? And if you predict any changes in the near future?
Is this just acknowledging some sort of monkey brain thing, or endorsing it as well? (If part of it is acknowledging it, then kudos. I appreciate the honesty and bravery. I also think the data point is relevant to what is discussed in the post.)
I ask because it strikes me as a Reversed Stupidity Is Not Intelligence sort of thing. If Hitler thinks the sky is green, well, he’s wrong, but it isn’t really relevant to the question of what color the sky actually is.
The first paragraph doesn’t include jacquesthibs’s original state before becoming vegetarian, leaving some ambiguity. I think you’re parsing it as “I went from vegan to vegetarian because I stopped trusting vegans”. The other parsing is “I went from omnivore to vegetarian, despite not trusting vegans, because I did my own research.” The rest of the comment makes me fairly confident that the second parsing is correct; but certainly it would be easier to follow if it were stated upfront.
Sorry, I assumed it was obvious we were talking about omnivore to vegan given that Ninety-Three was talking about not being open to becoming vegan if vegans tried to convince them. I do see the ambiguity though.
I mean, to a point; if vegans are your main source of information on veganism and its costs, and you find out a pattern of vegans being untrustworthy, this means you’re left to navigate veganism alone, which is itself a cost and a risk. Having a supportive community that you can trust makes a big difference in how easy it is to stick to big lifestyle decisions.