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.)
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.)