I agree that veganism is a really bad altruistic tradeoff. However, it seems to me that it is importantly different from the other examples you mention. (Ask for your drink without a straw. Unplug your microwave when not in use. Bring a water bottle to events. Stop using air conditioning. Choose products that minimize packaging.)
Maybe this is the difference: With veganism, if everyone was vegan, the problem would be solved. So if you are vegan you are doing your part, and moreover spreading the gospel of veganism is a decent strategy for solving the problem. But with climate change, if everyone drinks without straws, unplugs their microwaves, etc., the problem will 99.999% still remain. So there’s something inherently silly about those behaviors compared to veganism.
if everyone was vegan, the problem would be solved
To generalize, while the problem of animal abuse would go away, the problem of animal suffering wouldn’t. Likewise, unplugging your microwave would solve the problem of microwaves using too much energy, but wouldn’t solve the problem of efficient energy capture, or climate change.
This feels disanalogous to me in that climate change is something that happens through the aggregated effects of everyone, so adding or removing the energy consumption of a single human is too small of an impact to have an effect on the total outcome. Animal suffering is different in that, while it is true that the whole of animal suffering (or even the whole of factory farming) will not be solved, the actions of individual humans will still have effects on individual animals:
me changing my behavior may actually prevent a specific suffering-filled life from happening, and this feels like a thing that matters, because individual lives matter even if this doesn’t solve the aggregate problem
me changing my behavior may also prevent specific pollutants from entering the atmosphere, but individual pollutants don’t matter if their effect on the aggregate problem is negligible
This was going to be my original response actually, but then I thought: You don’t actually prevent specific suffering-filled lives from happening by being vegan, probably. Probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your reduced consumption will make the crucial difference between a factory farm deciding to produce X chickens or X+10,000 chickens next year. Similarly, with global warming probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your microwave-unplugging will be save the crucial amount of carbon that protects one refugee somewhere from dying of heat stroke or something fifty years from now. Moreover not using plastic straws also has a chance of saving specific lives, e.g. your straw might be picked out of a dump by a bird and then ingested by a sea creature or something.
I accept this counterargument, but it doesn’t seem compelling to me for some reason. Maybe the reason is that animal abuse seems like a big part of the overall moral problem, perhaps even the biggest part, whereas the problem of microwaves using too much energy is obviously a trivial component not just of the overall moral situation but even of more specific moral problems like efficient energy capture.
I agree that veganism is a really bad altruistic tradeoff. However, it seems to me that it is importantly different from the other examples you mention. (Ask for your drink without a straw. Unplug your microwave when not in use. Bring a water bottle to events. Stop using air conditioning. Choose products that minimize packaging.)
Maybe this is the difference: With veganism, if everyone was vegan, the problem would be solved. So if you are vegan you are doing your part, and moreover spreading the gospel of veganism is a decent strategy for solving the problem. But with climate change, if everyone drinks without straws, unplugs their microwaves, etc., the problem will 99.999% still remain. So there’s something inherently silly about those behaviors compared to veganism.
To generalize, while the problem of animal abuse would go away, the problem of animal suffering wouldn’t. Likewise, unplugging your microwave would solve the problem of microwaves using too much energy, but wouldn’t solve the problem of efficient energy capture, or climate change.
This feels disanalogous to me in that climate change is something that happens through the aggregated effects of everyone, so adding or removing the energy consumption of a single human is too small of an impact to have an effect on the total outcome. Animal suffering is different in that, while it is true that the whole of animal suffering (or even the whole of factory farming) will not be solved, the actions of individual humans will still have effects on individual animals:
me changing my behavior may actually prevent a specific suffering-filled life from happening, and this feels like a thing that matters, because individual lives matter even if this doesn’t solve the aggregate problem
me changing my behavior may also prevent specific pollutants from entering the atmosphere, but individual pollutants don’t matter if their effect on the aggregate problem is negligible
This was going to be my original response actually, but then I thought: You don’t actually prevent specific suffering-filled lives from happening by being vegan, probably. Probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your reduced consumption will make the crucial difference between a factory farm deciding to produce X chickens or X+10,000 chickens next year. Similarly, with global warming probably your effect is nothing at all, but there’s a chance that your microwave-unplugging will be save the crucial amount of carbon that protects one refugee somewhere from dying of heat stroke or something fifty years from now. Moreover not using plastic straws also has a chance of saving specific lives, e.g. your straw might be picked out of a dump by a bird and then ingested by a sea creature or something.
I accept this counterargument, but it doesn’t seem compelling to me for some reason. Maybe the reason is that animal abuse seems like a big part of the overall moral problem, perhaps even the biggest part, whereas the problem of microwaves using too much energy is obviously a trivial component not just of the overall moral situation but even of more specific moral problems like efficient energy capture.