I eat most meats (all except octopus and chicken) and have done this my entire life, except once when I went vegan for Lent. This state seems basically fine because it is acceptable from scope-sensitive consequentialist, deontic, and common-sense points of view, and it improves my diet enough that it’s not worth giving up meat “just because”.
According to EA-style consequentialism, eating meat is a pretty small percentage of your impact, and even if you’re not directly offsetting, the impact can be vastly outweighed by positive impact in your career or donations to other causes.
There is a finite amount of sadness I’m willing to put up with for the sake of impact, and it seems far more important to use the vast majority of my limited sadness budget in my career choice.
There is no universally accepted deontological rule against indirectly causing the expected number of tortured animals to increase by one, nor would this be viable as it requires tracking the consequences of your actions through the complicated world, which defeats the point of deontology. There might be a rule against benefiting from identifiable torture, but I don’t believe in deontology strongly enough to think this is definitive. Note there isn’t a good contractualist angle against torturing animals like there is for humans.
Common-sense morality says that meat-eating is traditional and not torturing the animals yourself does reduce how bad it is, and although this is pretty silly as a general principle, it applies to the other benefit of being vegan, which is less corrupted moral reasoning. My empathy and moral reasoning are less corrupted by eating meat than it would be working in a factory farm or slaughterhouse. Also I get around half the empathy benefits of veganism anyway, just by not eating chicken.
I do have some doubts; sometimes eating meat feels like being a slaveholder in 1800, which feels pretty bad. I hope history will not judge me harshly for what seem like reasonable decisions now, and plan to go vegan or move to a high-welfare-only diet when it’s easier.
I agree with the first bullet point in theory, but see the Corrupted Hardware sequence of posts. It’s hard to know the true impact of most interventions, and easy for people to come up with reasons why whatever they want to do happens to have large positive externalities. “Don’t directly inflict pain” is something we can be very confident is actually a good thing, without worrying about second-order effects.
Additionally, there’s no reason why doing bad things should be acceptable just due to also doing unrelated good things. Sure it’s net positive from a consequentialist frame, but ceasing the bad things while continuing to do the good things is even more positive! Giving up meat is not some ultimate hardship like martyrdom, nor is there any strong argument that meat-eating is necessary in order to keep doing the other good things. It’s more akin to quitting a minor drug addition; hard and requires a lot of self-control at first, but after the craving goes away your life is pretty much the same as it was before.
As for the rest of your comment, any line of reasoning that would equally excuse slavery and the holocaust is, I think, pretty suspect.
I eat most meats (all except octopus and chicken) and have done this my entire life, except once when I went vegan for Lent. This state seems basically fine because it is acceptable from scope-sensitive consequentialist, deontic, and common-sense points of view, and it improves my diet enough that it’s not worth giving up meat “just because”.
According to EA-style consequentialism, eating meat is a pretty small percentage of your impact, and even if you’re not directly offsetting, the impact can be vastly outweighed by positive impact in your career or donations to other causes.
There is a finite amount of sadness I’m willing to put up with for the sake of impact, and it seems far more important to use the vast majority of my limited sadness budget in my career choice.
There is no universally accepted deontological rule against indirectly causing the expected number of tortured animals to increase by one, nor would this be viable as it requires tracking the consequences of your actions through the complicated world, which defeats the point of deontology. There might be a rule against benefiting from identifiable torture, but I don’t believe in deontology strongly enough to think this is definitive. Note there isn’t a good contractualist angle against torturing animals like there is for humans.
Common-sense morality says that meat-eating is traditional and not torturing the animals yourself does reduce how bad it is, and although this is pretty silly as a general principle, it applies to the other benefit of being vegan, which is less corrupted moral reasoning. My empathy and moral reasoning are less corrupted by eating meat than it would be working in a factory farm or slaughterhouse. Also I get around half the empathy benefits of veganism anyway, just by not eating chicken.
I do have some doubts; sometimes eating meat feels like being a slaveholder in 1800, which feels pretty bad. I hope history will not judge me harshly for what seem like reasonable decisions now, and plan to go vegan or move to a high-welfare-only diet when it’s easier.
I agree with the first bullet point in theory, but see the Corrupted Hardware sequence of posts. It’s hard to know the true impact of most interventions, and easy for people to come up with reasons why whatever they want to do happens to have large positive externalities. “Don’t directly inflict pain” is something we can be very confident is actually a good thing, without worrying about second-order effects.
Additionally, there’s no reason why doing bad things should be acceptable just due to also doing unrelated good things. Sure it’s net positive from a consequentialist frame, but ceasing the bad things while continuing to do the good things is even more positive! Giving up meat is not some ultimate hardship like martyrdom, nor is there any strong argument that meat-eating is necessary in order to keep doing the other good things. It’s more akin to quitting a minor drug addition; hard and requires a lot of self-control at first, but after the craving goes away your life is pretty much the same as it was before.
As for the rest of your comment, any line of reasoning that would equally excuse slavery and the holocaust is, I think, pretty suspect.