You will save an expected number of animals equal to the number of animals you don’t eat that you would otherwise have eaten. You might not personally tip any balances, because factory farms operate on large scales; but you might be the Nth vegetarian whose decision justifies shutting down a factory farm full of suffering animals. The utility of the latter counterbalances its small likelihood.
Also, stigma? Where do you live? If anything, being a vegetarian lets me be smug and self-righteous in social situations.
Is that “expected” in the mathematical sense? As in, probability of my actions having the consequence that N animals are saved, times N? How do you work out that the numbers work out in such a way that N equals the number of animals I would have eaten? That strikes me as an unlikely coincidence.
As a rough basis for back-of-the-envelope calculation, assume I eat 200g of meat per day. I estimate one cow provides about 250Kg of the type of cuts I eat. That means I have so far in my life eaten about 4 cows. (Simplifying assumptions: I eat only cow meat, have eaten the same amount constantly for 40 years. We could work this out in more detail but I’m interested in orders of magniture here.) Perhaps five to ten times as many hogs.
Cows don’t seem to lead a particularly horrible life. True, this life is cut short at a fraction of their natural lifespan, but on the other hand cows don’t seem to form explicit life plans or intense emotional attachments to other members of their species beyond rearing. I worry about the hogs a little more, but it’s also the more affordable meat (the disutility of not eating them is larger).
So, we’re talking about a major lifestyle change, traded for a reduction in animal suffering which is only probable, not certain, and which tops out at a small number of individual animals.
Is that “expected” in the mathematical sense? As in, probability of my actions having the consequence that N animals are saved, times N? How do you work out that the numbers work out in such a way that N equals the number of animals I would have eaten? That strikes me as an unlikely coincidence.
It’s not a coincidence. People farming meat animals do so because they expect to be able to sell the meat. If they consistently find that they can’t sell it all, or have enough surplus floating around that the price drops and underperforming farms can no longer economically stay in the business, then some farms will shut down. If you’ve eaten 40 hogs in your life, then you have generated demand for 40 hogs. If there’s a farm that had produced 40,000 hogs’ worth of meat in your lifetime, then it takes 1,000 people like you to support that farm. It’s a problem of collective action to get the necessary number of people to quit patronizing it, but that sort of thing is relatively elementary for LW.
You seem to be assuming that meat farming scales linearly in most respects with the number of people consuming the meat. I’d question that assumption, and assume instead that there are marked threshold effects.
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program, so that it could keep up its volume by selling at lower prices; this would likely be to the hogs’ detriment, since they are the “stakeholders” least likely to raise a politically effective complaint about such changes. And frankly, given what I know of the industry, this is a scarily plausible scenario.
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program
Quite frankly, I don’t think this argument makes sense. Meat factories are already ruthless cost-cutting programs, and hogs “complaints” are already not taken into account.
What you seem to be implying here is that if meat farming is bad, we should better give them money so they don’t make it even worse.
What you seem to be implying here is that if meat farming is bad, we should better give them money so they don’t make it even worse.
Not so far off the mark, I guess. You might call that a “fair trade meat” argument.
I prefer to buy my meat at a local butcher’s, where it’s slightly more expensive but is sourced from a smallish factory 125km away; when I buy it at supermarket chain, my assumption is that the meat has traveled more miles and comes from a larger factory which treats animals worse. (The butcher advertises where the meat comes from, the supermarket doesn’t.)
So your argument, if I understand it correctly, is this:
Cheap meat comes from farms that treat their animals badly.
More expensive meat comes from farms that treat their animals better.
Your conclusion is then that we shouldn’t force farms into financial trouble, because then the second type turns into the first type due to needing to cut costs.
Here is my view of things:
Farms that treat their animals badly are large, cost-efficiënt farms, solely focused on profit. The only reason their meat is cheap is because that’s the optimal sales/price ratio.
Farms that want to treat their animals better produce inherently more expensive meat.
For your view, the causal relation is from the meatprice to the animal welfare. For me it’s the other way around: the animal welfare causes the meatprice.
Current fairtrade farms aren’t fairtrade because they want to sell expensive meat. Instead, they want to treat their animals well, which means they’re fairtrade and which results in higher meat prices.
Now, to tie this worldview back into the argument we were having: If 1000 people who previously bought from the supermarket stop buying, megafarms won’t start treating their animals worse. After a while, they would reduce their chicken output over time in order to minimize leftover chickens.
If 1000 people who previously bought locally decide to stop doing that, it might increase cost for the rest of the fairtrade buyers, reducing their motivation for buying fairtrade. However, it wouldn’t make the fairtrade farmers promptly drop their fairtrade motivations. It also wouldn’t suddenly turn them into megafarms, since they don’t have the volume for that.
I’m going to tap out at this point. First, this subthread revives a conversation that died eighteen months ago. Second, I don’t hold out much hope of its generating new insight.
Last but not least, I started it out of curiosity, in order to obtain answers to specific questions about vegetarians’ decision procedures; that’s what I’m still interested in learning about, vs. defending my own (at the risk of coming up with weak rationalizations).
Last but not least, I started it out of curiosity, in order to obtain answers to specific questions about vegetarians’ decision procedures; that’s what I’m still interested in learning about
If you’re really still interested in this...
I started my vegetarian diet shortly after I decided to adopt some definite policy in terms of which kinds of meat were ok to eat and which were not, because the common policy of excluding all meat from domesticated animals such as cats and dogs was too fuzzy for me. I experimented with different schelling points for a while, but it all seemed very arbitrary, even the schelling point right between humans and non-human animals, so I decided I had to either taboo all kinds of meat, or none.
Then it occured to me that there were some people around me I quite liked and really wouldn’t want to eat or seen eaten, so I’d have needed a schelling point anyway to determine which humans were fair game and which were not, and a very subjective one at that, and that was when I settled on vegetarianism.
A year or so thereafter I was considering veganism for a while, but it restricted my options too much and I was actually quite happy with the schelling point I had established, so that experiment was abandoned quickly.
Perhaps the whole thing becomes more understandable if I say that at the time I was generally aiming for more intrinsic consistency, and I was also regarding religious people who were actually living their lives according to their beliefs much more highly than lukewarm atheists who read horoscopes. In a way, my switch to vegetarianism was a side effect of my effort to develop a unified personal system of ethics.
None of this is related to human or animal suffering in any way, I’m afraid.
I think the word you’re looking for is pet—the standard meaning of domesticated also includes livestock, whose meat, if anything, I guess is seen as less ethically problematic than game by many people. (From your username, I’m guessing you’re not a native speaker. FWIW, neither am I.)
I decided I had to either taboo all kinds of meat, or none
You know, you could decide not to eat certain kinds of meat for reasons other than “taboo”; for example, that it’s too expensive (either in terms of money or of energy) or that you don’t like the way it tastes or for signalling reasons or for health reasons or because you’d be uncomfortable with the idea of eating it for purely emotional reasons or whatever. Just because oysters don’t feel pain doesn’t mean I’m obligated to eat them, if I know better ways to spend my money or if I prefer the taste of different food.
I think the word you’re looking for is pet—the standard meaning of domesticated also includes livestock, whose meat, if anything, I guess is seen as less ethically problematic than game by many people. (From your username, I’m guessing you’re not a native speaker. FWIW, neither am I.)
You’re right, it’s not exactly a matter of domestication, but it’s not only pets, either; horses fall into that category just as well. As I said, it’s too fuzzy and arbitrary.
You know, you could decide not to eat certain kinds of meat for reasons other than “taboo”; for example, that it’s too expensive (either in terms of money or of energy) or that you don’t like the way it tastes or for signalling reasons or for health reasons or because you’d be uncomfortable with the idea of eating it for purely emotional reasons or whatever. Just because oysters don’t feel pain doesn’t mean I’m obligated to eat them, if I know better ways to spend my money or if I prefer the taste of different food.
But that’s exactly the point, I was deliberately looking to find some general system that would allow me to classify food into two categories. Of course I don’t eat something I don’t like or that’s otherwise undesirable if it can be avoided, that’s not the issue here. This is purely about the moral part, and the problem is that there’s some meat I have moral obejctions to eating, and other meat I don’t, and there’s a very slippery slope in between. If I object to eating human meat, where’s the watershed? How about the homo sapiens species in general, such as the extinct subspecies h. sapiens idaltu? How about other species of the homo genus? Apes? Monkeys? Aliens?
A collection of ad-hoc rules isn’t a system of ethics.
On Lesswrong there’s no real objection against reviving old posts, which I think is a good thing.
Your second point surprises me. As a rational vegan, the animal suffering is the direct reason I don’t eat meat or eggs, via Alicorn’s expected animal suffering hypothesis:
You will save an expected number of animals equal to the number of animals you don’t eat that you would otherwise have eaten.
You seem to disagree about that, and after writing and deleting a full post, I think I understood where our differences came from, and wrote the new reply above.
[I would like to] obtain answers to specific questions about vegetarians’ decision procedures; that’s what I’m still interested in learning about, vs. defending my own.
Those two things are related, in the sense that if your own conflicts with a vegetarian’s procedure, then one of them is wrong and both should be argued.
Nevertheless, I respect tapping out, and would like to thank you for the discussion so far. Feel free to reply anyway if you change your mind!
Yes, though depending on your (definitive or provisional) conclusions about how much sapience matters, there may be an inflection point.
At the bottom of that scale, I wouldn’t worry about eating very small animals because very small brains seem to make for negligible amounts of moral concern. At the higher end, and as this link from elsewhere in this thread suggests, larger animals are more “suffering efficient” to coin a phrase both horrible and awkard, but also suggestive.
I don’t think an oyster suffers in any meaningful sense, and I don’t worry a whole lot about fish. I worry more about chickens and hogs than about cows because it takes a larger number of them to yield an equivalent mass of meat.
Oh nice, I had never considered that! Thanks for this new conclusion that flows naturally from two of my beliefs: Brain size differences between species don’t correlate strongly with intelligence differences*, and suffering is bad.
You will save an expected number of animals equal to the number of animals you don’t eat that you would otherwise have eaten. You might not personally tip any balances, because factory farms operate on large scales; but you might be the Nth vegetarian whose decision justifies shutting down a factory farm full of suffering animals. The utility of the latter counterbalances its small likelihood.
Also, stigma? Where do you live? If anything, being a vegetarian lets me be smug and self-righteous in social situations.
Perhaps my social circles are unusual, but in my experience smug self-righteousness tends to have some stigma associated with it.
“Lets me” was shorthand for “gives me social leeway to be”. This leeway must of course be exercised judiciously.
Is that “expected” in the mathematical sense? As in, probability of my actions having the consequence that N animals are saved, times N? How do you work out that the numbers work out in such a way that N equals the number of animals I would have eaten? That strikes me as an unlikely coincidence.
As a rough basis for back-of-the-envelope calculation, assume I eat 200g of meat per day. I estimate one cow provides about 250Kg of the type of cuts I eat. That means I have so far in my life eaten about 4 cows. (Simplifying assumptions: I eat only cow meat, have eaten the same amount constantly for 40 years. We could work this out in more detail but I’m interested in orders of magniture here.) Perhaps five to ten times as many hogs.
Cows don’t seem to lead a particularly horrible life. True, this life is cut short at a fraction of their natural lifespan, but on the other hand cows don’t seem to form explicit life plans or intense emotional attachments to other members of their species beyond rearing. I worry about the hogs a little more, but it’s also the more affordable meat (the disutility of not eating them is larger).
So, we’re talking about a major lifestyle change, traded for a reduction in animal suffering which is only probable, not certain, and which tops out at a small number of individual animals.
It’s not a coincidence. People farming meat animals do so because they expect to be able to sell the meat. If they consistently find that they can’t sell it all, or have enough surplus floating around that the price drops and underperforming farms can no longer economically stay in the business, then some farms will shut down. If you’ve eaten 40 hogs in your life, then you have generated demand for 40 hogs. If there’s a farm that had produced 40,000 hogs’ worth of meat in your lifetime, then it takes 1,000 people like you to support that farm. It’s a problem of collective action to get the necessary number of people to quit patronizing it, but that sort of thing is relatively elementary for LW.
You seem to be assuming that meat farming scales linearly in most respects with the number of people consuming the meat. I’d question that assumption, and assume instead that there are marked threshold effects.
Possibly 1000 people swearing off pork would instead have the effect of driving that same farm to a ruthless cost-cutting program, so that it could keep up its volume by selling at lower prices; this would likely be to the hogs’ detriment, since they are the “stakeholders” least likely to raise a politically effective complaint about such changes. And frankly, given what I know of the industry, this is a scarily plausible scenario.
Quite frankly, I don’t think this argument makes sense. Meat factories are already ruthless cost-cutting programs, and hogs “complaints” are already not taken into account.
What you seem to be implying here is that if meat farming is bad, we should better give them money so they don’t make it even worse.
Not so far off the mark, I guess. You might call that a “fair trade meat” argument.
I prefer to buy my meat at a local butcher’s, where it’s slightly more expensive but is sourced from a smallish factory 125km away; when I buy it at supermarket chain, my assumption is that the meat has traveled more miles and comes from a larger factory which treats animals worse. (The butcher advertises where the meat comes from, the supermarket doesn’t.)
So your argument, if I understand it correctly, is this:
Cheap meat comes from farms that treat their animals badly.
More expensive meat comes from farms that treat their animals better.
Your conclusion is then that we shouldn’t force farms into financial trouble, because then the second type turns into the first type due to needing to cut costs.
Here is my view of things:
Farms that treat their animals badly are large, cost-efficiënt farms, solely focused on profit. The only reason their meat is cheap is because that’s the optimal sales/price ratio.
Farms that want to treat their animals better produce inherently more expensive meat.
For your view, the causal relation is from the meatprice to the animal welfare.
For me it’s the other way around: the animal welfare causes the meatprice.
Current fairtrade farms aren’t fairtrade because they want to sell expensive meat. Instead, they want to treat their animals well, which means they’re fairtrade and which results in higher meat prices.
Now, to tie this worldview back into the argument we were having:
If 1000 people who previously bought from the supermarket stop buying, megafarms won’t start treating their animals worse. After a while, they would reduce their chicken output over time in order to minimize leftover chickens.
If 1000 people who previously bought locally decide to stop doing that, it might increase cost for the rest of the fairtrade buyers, reducing their motivation for buying fairtrade. However, it wouldn’t make the fairtrade farmers promptly drop their fairtrade motivations. It also wouldn’t suddenly turn them into megafarms, since they don’t have the volume for that.
I’m going to tap out at this point. First, this subthread revives a conversation that died eighteen months ago. Second, I don’t hold out much hope of its generating new insight.
Last but not least, I started it out of curiosity, in order to obtain answers to specific questions about vegetarians’ decision procedures; that’s what I’m still interested in learning about, vs. defending my own (at the risk of coming up with weak rationalizations).
If you’re really still interested in this...
I started my vegetarian diet shortly after I decided to adopt some definite policy in terms of which kinds of meat were ok to eat and which were not, because the common policy of excluding all meat from domesticated animals such as cats and dogs was too fuzzy for me. I experimented with different schelling points for a while, but it all seemed very arbitrary, even the schelling point right between humans and non-human animals, so I decided I had to either taboo all kinds of meat, or none.
Then it occured to me that there were some people around me I quite liked and really wouldn’t want to eat or seen eaten, so I’d have needed a schelling point anyway to determine which humans were fair game and which were not, and a very subjective one at that, and that was when I settled on vegetarianism.
A year or so thereafter I was considering veganism for a while, but it restricted my options too much and I was actually quite happy with the schelling point I had established, so that experiment was abandoned quickly.
Perhaps the whole thing becomes more understandable if I say that at the time I was generally aiming for more intrinsic consistency, and I was also regarding religious people who were actually living their lives according to their beliefs much more highly than lukewarm atheists who read horoscopes. In a way, my switch to vegetarianism was a side effect of my effort to develop a unified personal system of ethics.
None of this is related to human or animal suffering in any way, I’m afraid.
You know, you could decide not to eat certain kinds of meat for reasons other than “taboo”; for example, that it’s too expensive (either in terms of money or of energy) or that you don’t like the way it tastes or for signalling reasons or for health reasons or because you’d be uncomfortable with the idea of eating it for purely emotional reasons or whatever. Just because oysters don’t feel pain doesn’t mean I’m obligated to eat them, if I know better ways to spend my money or if I prefer the taste of different food.
You’re right, it’s not exactly a matter of domestication, but it’s not only pets, either; horses fall into that category just as well. As I said, it’s too fuzzy and arbitrary.
But that’s exactly the point, I was deliberately looking to find some general system that would allow me to classify food into two categories. Of course I don’t eat something I don’t like or that’s otherwise undesirable if it can be avoided, that’s not the issue here. This is purely about the moral part, and the problem is that there’s some meat I have moral obejctions to eating, and other meat I don’t, and there’s a very slippery slope in between. If I object to eating human meat, where’s the watershed? How about the homo sapiens species in general, such as the extinct subspecies h. sapiens idaltu? How about other species of the homo genus? Apes? Monkeys? Aliens?
A collection of ad-hoc rules isn’t a system of ethics.
On Lesswrong there’s no real objection against reviving old posts, which I think is a good thing.
Your second point surprises me. As a rational vegan, the animal suffering is the direct reason I don’t eat meat or eggs, via Alicorn’s expected animal suffering hypothesis:
You seem to disagree about that, and after writing and deleting a full post, I think I understood where our differences came from, and wrote the new reply above.
Those two things are related, in the sense that if your own conflicts with a vegetarian’s procedure, then one of them is wrong and both should be argued.
Nevertheless, I respect tapping out, and would like to thank you for the discussion so far. Feel free to reply anyway if you change your mind!
Does this argument imply a preference for eating larger animals?
Yes, though depending on your (definitive or provisional) conclusions about how much sapience matters, there may be an inflection point.
At the bottom of that scale, I wouldn’t worry about eating very small animals because very small brains seem to make for negligible amounts of moral concern. At the higher end, and as this link from elsewhere in this thread suggests, larger animals are more “suffering efficient” to coin a phrase both horrible and awkard, but also suggestive.
I don’t think an oyster suffers in any meaningful sense, and I don’t worry a whole lot about fish. I worry more about chickens and hogs than about cows because it takes a larger number of them to yield an equivalent mass of meat.
Oh nice, I had never considered that! Thanks for this new conclusion that flows naturally from two of my beliefs: Brain size differences between species don’t correlate strongly with intelligence differences*, and suffering is bad.
*It’s mostly brain-to-body mass ratio that seems to correlate.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain-to-body_mass_ratio
Within 1 species, there seems to be correlation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brain_size#Intelligence