1) The calculation is wrong. If point 1 is the base number (which you seem to be setting at 0.05 of $5), then point 5 (value animal places on their own life) should increase the value of vegetarianism however it decreases it in your model.
2) You’re setting the value of 12.5 days of human suffering at $5. That is insane. By comparison, governments tend to set a human life at $10,000,000, and average lifespans are around 78 years, so 12.5 days is equivalent to about $4,000. The UK’s QALY is set at $50,000 which comes to $1,700.
3) This isn’t an argument from effective altruism; it’s utilitarianism. Eating meat does not increase your ability to donate to charity. It actually generally decreases it because meat tends to cost more; especially if government subsidies were removed.
For others considering vegetarianism as a lifestyle, I will say that I was a pollotarian for several years before becoming a full vegetarian. Your other options include becoming a pescetarian or a pollopescetarian. Cows and pigs are more similar to humans so the likelihood of reducing net harm is much greater by not eating them than for other animals. This can be a useful transition stage into full vegetarian, or you’re still improving the world even if you never make the full switch.
EDIT—replaced “after including government subsidies” with “if government subsidies were removed”; same meaning but less ambiguous
You’re setting the value of 12.5 days of human suffering at $5. That is insane. By comparison, governments tend to set a human life at $10,000,000, and average lifespans are around 78 years, so 12.5 days is equivalent to about $4,000. The UK’s QALY is set at $50,000 which comes to $1,700.
Our world is insane. You can currently pay $5 and alleviate 12.5 days of human suffering.
(That’s $146 per QALY/DALY, which is close to GiveWell’s estimate for the benefit of donating to SCI. See how cost effective is mass deworming.)
Cows and pigs are more similar to humans so the likelihood of reducing net harm is much greater by not eating them than for other animals.
This is interesting—I tend to make the opposite argument that people should initially focus on giving up fish, chicken, and eggs, because they constitute the vast majority of animals that die for the average American meat-eater’s diet. The way the numbers work out, you would need to think it’s ~100x less likely that fish and chickens were sentient for the argument for eating fish/chickens rather than cows/pigs to work. I think that fish and chickens are not that much less likely to be sentient, but I’d be interested in hearing an argument that they were.
I was thinking in terms of a per animal basis. I hadn’t considered total consummation. My reasons for being a pollotarian and later a vegetarian has to do with gradual changes in my views over time and not as simple as animal rights considerations. However, one argument along these lines is ostroveganism. Mammals’ understanding of pain is, from what I can gather, very similar to our own. As you move into animals less closely related to us, their nervous systems become less and less similar.
I think that the argument also holds on a per-unit of meat basis (therefore controlling for the quantity that humans eat), although you only get a factor of 20 for chickens vs cows. (Here is source, warning that you have to scroll through pictures of chickens and fish being tortured to get to the numbers). I also sort of agree with the case for ostroveganism, although I haven’t thought about it much since I find the thought of eating seafood viscerally disgusting anyway.
I agree that we should think that animals further away from us evolutionarily are less likely to be sentient and suffer, but I’m not sure that the drop is as big as a factor of 10.
I suggest sticking with poultry, since that reduces the harm by 99% regardless of who’s right. (I pulled that number out of nowhere, but you get the point.)
Those examples you’re using to set the value of human life are not of people paying to save human lives generally, they’re of people who want to save the lives of specifically a group of people for whom adding QALYs is very expensive. They might seem emotionally closer to what a human life is “worth”, but the relevant thing to this question is what the lowest price QALYs can be reliably bought for is.
Yes, but that sort of thinking is only really useful if you’re trying to maintain neutral-utility at the lowest cost. It’s not what most would aspire to. That’s not even utilitarianism really; it’s just the closest thing I could think of.
It’s useful if you’re trying to maintain X utility at the lowest cost for any X. It’s also useful if you’re trying to maximize utility at a given cost Y. If you only have a finite amount of money, it’s useful.
One might be deciding to increase the amount of utility they’re adding, and deciding between vegetarianism and donating more money to effective charities than they were already giving. The limit is how hard it is for the altruist to do each of those things, so if they find giving the amount to achieve an equivalent amount of good to going vegan is less painful than for them to go vegan, they should do that. Caring the amount a utilitarian “should” is enough to grind most people to dust (I, personally, faced an opposite issue of looking at the problem and immediately giving up on morality and becoming functionally an egoist).
1) The calculation is wrong. If point 1 is the base number (which you seem to be setting at 0.05 of $5), then point 5 (value animal places on their own life) should increase the value of vegetarianism however it decreases it in your model.
2) You’re setting the value of 12.5 days of human suffering at $5. That is insane. By comparison, governments tend to set a human life at $10,000,000, and average lifespans are around 78 years, so 12.5 days is equivalent to about $4,000. The UK’s QALY is set at $50,000 which comes to $1,700.
3)
This isn’t an argument from effective altruism; it’s utilitarianism.Eating meat does not increase your ability to donate to charity. It actually generally decreases it because meat tends to cost more; especially if government subsidies were removed.For others considering vegetarianism as a lifestyle, I will say that I was a pollotarian for several years before becoming a full vegetarian. Your other options include becoming a pescetarian or a pollopescetarian. Cows and pigs are more similar to humans so the likelihood of reducing net harm is much greater by not eating them than for other animals. This can be a useful transition stage into full vegetarian, or you’re still improving the world even if you never make the full switch.
EDIT—replaced “after including government subsidies” with “if government subsidies were removed”; same meaning but less ambiguous
Our world is insane. You can currently pay $5 and alleviate 12.5 days of human suffering.
(That’s $146 per QALY/DALY, which is close to GiveWell’s estimate for the benefit of donating to SCI. See how cost effective is mass deworming.)
This is interesting—I tend to make the opposite argument that people should initially focus on giving up fish, chicken, and eggs, because they constitute the vast majority of animals that die for the average American meat-eater’s diet. The way the numbers work out, you would need to think it’s ~100x less likely that fish and chickens were sentient for the argument for eating fish/chickens rather than cows/pigs to work. I think that fish and chickens are not that much less likely to be sentient, but I’d be interested in hearing an argument that they were.
I was thinking in terms of a per animal basis. I hadn’t considered total consummation. My reasons for being a pollotarian and later a vegetarian has to do with gradual changes in my views over time and not as simple as animal rights considerations. However, one argument along these lines is ostroveganism. Mammals’ understanding of pain is, from what I can gather, very similar to our own. As you move into animals less closely related to us, their nervous systems become less and less similar.
I think that the argument also holds on a per-unit of meat basis (therefore controlling for the quantity that humans eat), although you only get a factor of 20 for chickens vs cows. (Here is source, warning that you have to scroll through pictures of chickens and fish being tortured to get to the numbers). I also sort of agree with the case for ostroveganism, although I haven’t thought about it much since I find the thought of eating seafood viscerally disgusting anyway.
I agree that we should think that animals further away from us evolutionarily are less likely to be sentient and suffer, but I’m not sure that the drop is as big as a factor of 10.
I suggest sticking with poultry, since that reduces the harm by 99% regardless of who’s right. (I pulled that number out of nowhere, but you get the point.)
Those examples you’re using to set the value of human life are not of people paying to save human lives generally, they’re of people who want to save the lives of specifically a group of people for whom adding QALYs is very expensive. They might seem emotionally closer to what a human life is “worth”, but the relevant thing to this question is what the lowest price QALYs can be reliably bought for is.
Yes, but that sort of thinking is only really useful if you’re trying to maintain neutral-utility at the lowest cost. It’s not what most would aspire to. That’s not even utilitarianism really; it’s just the closest thing I could think of.
It’s useful if you’re trying to maintain X utility at the lowest cost for any X. It’s also useful if you’re trying to maximize utility at a given cost Y. If you only have a finite amount of money, it’s useful.
One might be deciding to increase the amount of utility they’re adding, and deciding between vegetarianism and donating more money to effective charities than they were already giving. The limit is how hard it is for the altruist to do each of those things, so if they find giving the amount to achieve an equivalent amount of good to going vegan is less painful than for them to go vegan, they should do that. Caring the amount a utilitarian “should” is enough to grind most people to dust (I, personally, faced an opposite issue of looking at the problem and immediately giving up on morality and becoming functionally an egoist).
Fair enough. I retract the first sentence of point 3.