nothing is mere

Inhuman altruism: Inferential gap, or motivational gap?











The intellectual case against meat-eating is pretty air-tight







5. So don’t eat the animals in question.








Why isn’t LessWrong extremely veg(etari)an?





utilitarianism: Animals causes are admirably egalitarian and scope-sensitive.





I can think of a few reasons for the discrepancy:








What would make a transhumanist excited about this?





Be positive and concrete


















Embrace weird philosophies







  • ‘That’s speciesist!’






  1. I’m not even sure you need premise #5:

  2. orthonormal

    This post is giving me a bigger System 1 push toward veganism than anything else I’ve ever seen. Vegan rationalists might want to take note.

  3. blacktrance

    I reject Premises 3 and 5. Perhaps more world utility would be produced if I abstained from eating meat, but that’s not enough reason for me to not eat it. For me to stop eating meat, it would have to be the case that abstaining from eating it would produce more utility *for me*, which isn’t the case. As for Premise 5, regardless of what I’d want rational agents to choose, I can’t affect that by my choice, so the effects of what I do on net animal suffering are negligible.

    • Re 3: Do you strongly prefer that intelligent aliens not undergo large amounts of nonconsensual suffering? (This should help clarify the point of disagreement. E.g., if you just don’t care about other people, then my arguments won’t be relevant to you because they’re mostly directed at aspiring effective altruists.)

      Re 5: Would you defect in a Prisoner’s Dilemma against a perfect atom-by-atom replica of yourself?

      • blacktrance

        Re 3: I care about it, but that has to be weighed against my preference for the benefits of the activity that causes suffering as a side effect. When comparing my utility for me eating meat and me not eating meat, I get higher utility when I eat meat (even if I had some tiny effect on reducing animal suffering), even if there’d be a net world increase in utility if I didn’t eat meat.

        Re 5: If it were an atom-for-atom replica of me, there’d be a kind-of causal connection between myself and it, because, being my replica, it would reach the same conclusions that I would reach. But I don’t have this kind of influence on rational agents in general.

        • m

          “I get higher utility when I eat meat”
          How certain are you of that? And how much surplus utility do you gain per month from eating meat versus eating non-meat foods? (Could you give an estimate in comparative terms to some other things that you value?) Have you ever tried not eating meat for some longer duration of time? Say two months. If not, you could try it and introspect if something changed during the experiment. Even if you start out the experiment with somewhat lower experiential wellbeing at mealtimes you may see compensating utility gains from the intellectual challenge of the experience if you are a person who can take joy in such challenges. After two months you could always switch back.

          • m

            “of the experience” –> “of the experiment”

          • blacktrance

            I’m a picky eater and it’s difficult enough for me to find food I’m willing to eat, and most of it contains meat. If I cut out meat from my diet, I’d starve (not literally, but it would be a significant inconvenience).

  4. Taking premise 2 seriously—for these interpretations of “large amounts” and “huge”—seems to rest on the act omission distinction (which many EA’s may reject).

    (Premise 5 seems to be irrelevant.)

    • I originally added 5 (“Even if my eating a single hamburger has negligible direct causal impact on factory farming, I should select the action I’d want a large number of similar agents to select.”) to explain why veganism might be preferable to e.g. ‘only consuming animal products when they’d otherwise go to waste’ and to make it clear you’re deciding for all your future selves (so the amount of suffering at stake isn’t negligible). But since the rest of the argument is sketched so quickly and informally, I agree 5 is given too much weight; I’ll remove it.

      Re 2, I’m assuming that $100 is too low to be worth the cost to human welfare (and, similarly, that the taste and nutritional value of a lifetime of hamburgers isn’t worth the suffering of that many cattle). I’m not assuming it would be any better to passively allow humans or cattle to be tortured, or that actively torturing an agent has infinite disutility.

      • You can probably agree there is some price P you have to pay to reduce cattle suffering by one-steak’s-worth. My best guess is that this amount is a relatively small fraction (< 20%) of the price of the meat, even if you make very conservative assumptions about available options to reduce cattle suffering. That extra cost often doesn't tip the scales for me. (Note: I'm excluding make-people-vegetarian interventions here, since those have other complications and don't stand up under conservative assumptions.)

        I'm fine with vegetarianism for signaling reasons, for psychological reasons, as a way of eating frugally, or out of respect for non-utilitarian views. But I do think you should have "they are effectiveness-minded utilitarians, who don't have a psychological need for bright lines" on the list of possible explanations.

        This keeps coming up, so I will probably write a post about the price P of animal suffering on personal time.

        Pragmatically, I would really prefer a focus on shifting to low-suffering meat than on shifting to veganism. I think this is much more cost-effective, but the biggest reason is actually signaling—I would rather EA be associated with an unusual and cost-effective thing than a common and ineffective thing. The two are attractive to different audiences, but one audience seems more worth attracting.

        I also don't understand the analogy to cryonics. Cryonics is a (primarily) selfish expenditure, which most people don't do because it is weird and hard to defend in conversation. Vegetarianism is a relatively common altruistic sacrifice, which most people don't make because they don't care, it's easy to rationalize away, and they aren't under social pressure to change.

        • Supposing the numbers on are accurate, and I expect to live 50 more years, I can prevent 1500+ land animal deaths by abstaining from chicken, beef, etc. I’m not super confident the nutrition, taste, and convenience of eating meat over my lifetime improves my wellbeing enough to outweigh the expected suffering of even a single factory-formed chicken; and it’s not obvious to me that veganism would sap my productivity or reduce how much I give to other causes. So 1500 seems like a utilitarian steal to me.

          Why do you think popularizing low-suffering meat is more cost-effective? (Aside from the fact that some people will just naturally find that more appealing, and those people aren’t being targeted enough.)

          The main defenses of meat-eating I’ve seen recently come from people who strongly advocate cryonics and effective altruism but say we can’t be confident non-human animals suffer. I’m pointing to the tension between suggesting it’s OK to eat animals if the odds they’re conscious are <50%, and endorsing cryonics even when success is orders of magnitude less certain. I agree if you don't care about others' suffering this should be less convincing.

          • When you abstain from eating meat, you suffer a cost. Similarly, if you save $5 by eating a cheaper meal, and donate that $5 to do something good, you suffer a cost. Cost-effectiveness means having as large an effect as possible for a given cost.

            My claims were:

            1) Low-suffering meat is significantly more cost-effective than avoiding meat altogether (you avoid the vast majority of the animal welfare harms, for a fraction of the cost), and in general reducing meat is more cost-effective than being vegetarian. This seems intuitive: if some meat involves more suffering per benefit to the eater, and cutting out the least favorable meat is obviously the most cost-effective. (It might still be a good idea to cut out the rest of your meat.)

            If you actually care about the “1500 land animals” figure then you can reduce it by 95% (if I’m reading your source correctly) by cutting out poultry (which represents 1/3 of the american meat consumption). Citing “number of animals” seems to be a marketing thing, but the same point holds for more meaningful notions of suffering. For example, I think that cutting out almost all of beef feedlotting increases the price by something like 25%, but as far as I can tell the resulting quality of life is basically the same as in nature.

            I think the people who will find this more appealing are the people who care about efficiently making a difference. That seems like a good demographic to appeal to.

            2) In absolute terms, vegetarianism does not seem cost-effective in terms of “altruistic benefit / personal cost,” unless you don’t much like meat and aren’t much concerned about the nutrition issues. Again, if you reject the act-omission distinction it is obvious that you can donate some amount of money to offset the damages caused by eating meat. My claim was that this was a relatively small fraction of the price of a meaty-meal. If so, and if you would still sometimes buy meaty-meals if they were marked up, then you would be better off eating your meaty-meal and donating the “markup.”

            I think this discussion should be about how expensive it is to reduce animal suffering in other ways. You might be skeptical of my earlier 20% claim, for example.

            Personally, I don’t think animal welfare is a high-priority cause (because I think that stuff happening today mostly matters via making the world better overall, rather than via the immediate moral significance, and that animal welfare has a modest effect on overall world-bettering). So I can do even better by supporting higher-priority causes. But I grant that others might feel differently, and for them donating to reduce animal suffering might be the end of the line.

            Now you might be arguing “veganism has no cost.” But (1) that’s a different argument, which you aren’t making, (2) I disagree, (3) given that vegeterian food is cheaper, this would amount to either claiming that the price difference is precisely balanced for all people at once (implausibly) or that people are consistently making errors when they invest in more expensive food.

            • Ah, I understand your argument now. I think that’s a good rebuttal, assuming there’s a good chance that the food cost difference actually goes to an EA cause. I’ll note it above. If you write a blog post on the topic, or have a good reference for the claim that there are no realistic cheap vegan/vegetarian diets, I’ll add a link too.

              If a vegan diet inevitably costs more money than a meat-eating one, or reduces your productivity, I agree there’s a good EA case for eating meat. (The feasibility of soylent may be relevant here; soylent is cheap, and the new recipe is vegan.) I’ve heard arguments in both directions on how humane allegedly humane meat is, and how realistic it is to promote that option.

              Initially I thought you were arguing that eating meat is justifiable (for utilitarians) if veganism costs them too much happiness, whether or not it affects their ability to improve global utility. We shouldn’t collapse all of those costs into a single “personal cost” number that gets weighed against “altruistic benefit”. Utilitarian EAs should be trying to maximize altruistic benefit; we can ignore the question of whether we’ve found an altruistic-benefit-to-personal-cost ratio that feels fair, or only think about it when it’s an instrumentally useful way for motivating you. What’s attractive about veganism is that, if it can be done low-cost, it may allow you to have a substantial humanitarian impact without diverting resources from any of the other good things you do; it’s like getting to give to an extra, not-terrible charity for free.

            • To clarify my position a bit: I’m very confident it would be a utilitarian net-loss to make meat-eaters feel hounded and unwelcome on LW; I’m moderately confident it would be a utilitarian net-gain for most LWers to switch to more humane diets; and I tentatively believe there exist some LWers such that it would be a utilitarian net-loss for them to become vegans. These views may change if I decide ‘humane meat is a viable alternative’ (e.g., it’s cost-effective and has a chance of catching on) and/or ‘donating the extra-money-veganism-would-cost to an EA cause is a viable alternative’ (e.g., it’s not just a rationalization to do less good-in-general).

              I also agree with you that, social signaling benefits aside, ‘should I stop eating mammals?’ is not in the top 50 questions an effective altruist should spend time worrying about. It’s low-impact stuff (even compared to other animal interventions), and you’re unlikely to learn about other high-impact stuff in the process. I wouldn’t have brought up this issue if no one were talking about it; but given that a lot of people are talking about it, I think there’s value in giving the right utilitarian answer here, to prove we can take ideas seriously and be humane even when we don’t get Special Snowflake Contrarian Fuzzies out of it.

              I also agree that socially signaling non-(act)-utilitarian moral sentiment is part of why this matters. Moral character matters; e.g., I don’t think any community can survive if its members expect other members to happily harm them in serious ways the moment it’s a small utilitarian gain to do so. The slavery analogy seems right to me: If you’re an 18th-century member of a nascent American effective altruist community , there’s something corrosive-of-the-movement and corrosive-of-the-soul about relying on human slavery in your earning to give. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t contribute to slavery even to save the world; but the soul of the movement is a real thing that we should also factor into our calculations, and there’s a lot to be said for what Holden calls ‘standard ethics’ (which I take to mean injunctions like ‘try extra hard not to torture and enslave people’, not necessarily traditional/historical moral norms):


              The signaling value isn’t purely non-epistemic, either. For every slave-owner whose behaviors you defend who really is acting completely rationally and completely altruistically, there are many slave-owners interested in EA who are relying on motivated reasoning and dubious hypotheses to maintain their habits. (Though I grant your point that many of the abolitionists have ridiculous epistemologies too, and turning the 18th-century EA community into just another abolitionist organization isn’t necessarily the best way to maximize utility.)

  5. Avi

    I’m a selfish agent. So I disagree with premise 3.

    I don’t see anything wrong with eating possibly sentient animals. I wouldn’t see anything wrong with eating definitely sentient animals. If I would live in a society that ate people and viewed that as natural, I wouldn’t have any moral objections to that either. If my current society decided as a whole that eating animals was unnatural, I would probably stop eating animals do to social pressure, but do not feel enough pressure currently. (Although that should NOT be read as saying that a large amount of pressure put on me now would get me to change. The likely reaction would be of rebellion. My whole society has to change.)

  6. I think the “animals don’t have feelings” objection is usually rationalisation. The implication is that non-human animals should get literally zero moral weight — so if someone wants to torture puppies to death for sheer amusement, then it’s misplaced anthropomorphism to condemn them. It would be like condemning someone for running down NPCs in GTA. I seldom find people willing to take that horn of the dilemma.

    • Honnibal: I’ll bite on that one. I think that “liking to cause suffering” is unvirtuous and not a habit that should be built, but I do think that animals get zero moral weight and I am indifferent to puppies being tortured.

      • If you agree that it’s actually “suffering”, then you must disagree that it’s suffering which is morally relevant — i.e. you’re not a utilitarian?

        • Personally, I tend to identify as more of a virtue ethics person–“enjoying the suffering of others” is unvirtuous so I don’t want to be a person who does it.

          Politically, I’m consequentialist but I’m not sure I really qualify as “utilitarian.” Either way, I don’t really count animals in my moral universe.

  7. yboris

    Reblogged this on YBoris.

  8. Robert Dogg

    You need more scientific racism for LessWrong to upvote this.

  9. Dan

    15% vegetarian strikes me as a relatively high percentage. The base rate seems to be around 5% (attempting to combine various surveys into a single estimate). That means that the difference between LW and the general population for vegetarianism is probably larger than it is for signing up for cryonics or giving a lot to EA charities (although the ratio is necessarily smaller, because the latter two activities are so much rarer in the general population).

  10. 27chaos

    If you don’t even know what problems consciousness exists to solve, why do you think you understand it well enough to say that it is important or relevant to the ethics of animal suffering?

  11. BlanqLocust

    Imo, the thing here is. You can eat meat, not a lot of it but some of it, without having it produced in intensive fashions that do not allow the producer to care about the animal’s well-being. I have good intuitive reasons to think those who farm animals in some specific fashions significantly improve their lives compared to how these lives would be in nature. So I see absolutely no reason to not eat those animals. I do not think killing an animal when it has reached a certain maturity is any worst than what would happen to it in nature, and to me, if these are the only two alternatives – until we can somehow re-engineer all of nature, that’s a good enough reason to do it if it’s beneficial to me.


  1. Revenge of the Meat People! | nothing is mere
  2. Why Go Vegan? – A Diary for the End

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