I mean, I agree, sort of? But this is just not a realistic scalable solution. There aren't that many deer. I say that as someone who is trying (so far unsuccessfully) to learn to hunt without the benefit of family/social knowledge. I certainly plan to replace as much meat as I can with venison, but I think that, in the context of this discussion, it's lack of scalability makes it not very realistic.
I think there are different levels of compromise - vegan -> vegetarian -> person who offsets all their meat -> person who eats beef instead of chicken -> person who purchases ethically raised meat -> person who doesn't do anything. People at level n will always think the people at level n-1 are barbarians, and people at level n+1 are "contorting their diet to reach squeaky-clean moral cleanliness" - I don't think it's possible to escape either concern. My priority here is to make achieving whatever level of moral contribution you're going for as easy/effective as possible, so that a given level of effort can produce better results.
Also, my guess is that casually mentioning the existence of higher-commitment ways to do morality makes people more likely to do lower-commitment ways. A lot of people I know are vegan, and I don't think I could be vegan, but constantly being around them has shamed me into inconsistent pescetarianism. If I can make someone who currently does nothing get to the point where they eat ethically raised meat, I'll consider that a victory.
(though I'm also concerned about this because companies are really good at saying "We have ethically raised meat!" while making as few concessions to actually raising the meat ethically as possible, and you've got to be a real expert to navigate this space, whereas just not eating chicken is hard to get wrong)
I'm concerned that "cage free" could be a lie, but so could lots of things at the grocery store. At some point I have to trust the people doing oversight.
The raising of meat is also a lot more legible than carbon offsets. Someone can, in theory, inspect to make sure that chickens destined to live outside of a cage really are outside of a cage.
No. I speak as someone who's eaten everything from bugs in ChangMai to whale meat in Osaka. I especially have no problem with eating animals that have eaten other animals,
For the ethical vegetarians here, would animals having some amount of consciousness change your mind about animals that eat other animals that had consciousness?
I am an animal, by definition, with consciousness. If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster).
If animals have consciousness, and just like me they have consciousness at various levels on a spectrum, then they take their place in the spectrum of moral and evolutionary choices, just like me. Hence, I'm no better than they are, and as an omnivore my dietary choices are my own, including the animals I raise for food (some ant species farm aphids, so the natural world has allegories).
If on the other hand they don't have consciousness, and I do, and an argument can be made that my humanness puts me outside of the animal spectrum of moral or evolutionary choices, than none of this matters. They are animals and I'm a human and my moral choices regarding them doesn't register at all morally.
I'm either an animal, or I'm not, or I'm both. And in all cases my dietary choices fall into one of two morality spectrums that equally justify a dietary choice to eat other animals.
"I don't have the mastery of ethics to eloquently argue this..."
Whether you think you do or don't really is moot because, quite frankly, I don't think of dietary choices as an ethical issue. OTHER PEOPLE make it an ethical issue. For the vast majority of people it isn't, which makes arguing about it 'ethically' difficult and filled with crevasses and pitfalls as those other people try to convince someone with common sense that their berkshire hog exists in the same moral spectrum as their great-grandma Kathleen.
Like I said, for the overwhelming majority of people, this isn't an ethical issue at all.
> If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster).
The project of creating/adopting a moral framework isn't just the replication of whatever behaviors we see in the natural world; it's an attempt to actively modify the world by examining what principles create what we think of as "good" in the world then living/acting according to those principles.
"Animals also do this so I get to" is an extremely poor justifying moral principle in that it could be used to justify nearly any behavior -- eating your children, eating your parents, raping whomever, beating/killing rivals to maximize your sexual chances, etc etc. I assume you don't do all of these things as well and would find most of them morally repugnant, so I assume this framework doesn't guide most of your moral decision-making. Why do you use this principle/framework ("animals do it so I get to") it in this case but not others?
You may have failed to notice that I didn't say which one of the morality spectrums I ascribe to. The above was merely a thought experiment to demonstrate the fundamental logic that BOTH morality spectrums justify a human's decision to eat other animals. And they do.
Your personal beliefs are not particularly relevant to the question of whether "animals get to do this, so I do too" is a good moral principle to follow under any particular framework. If it was a thought experiment, continue to consider it one, and use it to actually engage with the points I brought up in the previous post re what morality is for, what it does, and that someone following this principle would also find themselves morally justified in any of the behaviors I mentioned.
"If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster)."
I'm not sure where this "get to" is coming from. Are you saying that someone has certified that whales are doing everything morally right, and therefore if you do things no better than whales do, then you are therefore also morally right?
I would say that, morally speaking, it's better if conscious beings have better experiences, and beings with preferences get more of their more important preferences satisfied. Tornadoes, forest fires, whales, and humans all sometimes do things that get in the way of this. Sometimes, us trying to stop the bad things ends up making things better, but sometimes it makes things worth. So just because I'm not out trying to stop tornadoes and stop whales doesn't mean I think it's bad to try to talk to a human to talk them into changing their behavior.
This is just another instance of the same thing we see that some bad behaviors are illegal, while other bad behaviors aren't, because actively trying to punish people for some bad behaviors is helpful, while actively trying to punish people for other bad behaviors often makes things worse.
Only other whales can do that. In every pod of whales one of the whales is designated as a certified whale morals certifier. Think of it like Iran's morality police, but in whale form. The Cetacean Certification Policewhale (CCP for short) signifies if another whale's actions are moral with one WOO if moral and a double WOO-WOO if immoral.
According to the CCP central statistics office, whales are generally quite moral, except for the southern Arctic and Pacific pods. Those whales are very immoral and have sex outside their pods and bully sharks and sea lions. But the Hawaiian whales are the most immoral of all. So bad they had to come up with a triple WOO-WOO-WOO, which is whale for "so bad they're going to whale hell". Steer clear of the Hawaiian whales, they kill for sport and sell drugs to cuttlefish.
> If animals have consciousness, and just like me they have consciousness at various levels on a spectrum, then they take their place in the spectrum of moral and evolutionary choices, just like me. Hence, I'm no better than they are
I don't see how this follows. Murederous psychopaths are roughly on the same point in the consciousness spectrum, yet it seems undeniable that most people are morally better than murderous psychopaths.
You're merely asserting that they're moral. I've read some of your other posts here and it doesn't seem like you think you need to justify calling something moral, but I don't see why that's true. Why should I accept your claims if you refuse to or cannot justify them?
Yes. The prohibition against cannibalism is primarily cultural (with a strong evolutionary case for disease prevention as well). I would never eat another human, but others have and some probably still do.
Depends on how. If they were simply eating my cadaver, then yes. If someone was attempting to kill me to eat me, well they can certainly try (they'll need a lot of luck and fashionable body armor).
In both cases the moral prohibition is simply cultural: natural circumstances the revulsion against cannibalism, unnatural circumstances the revulsion against murder.
I have no problem being in the food chain. I'm in it now. So you are you. All of us are. I also have no problem being at the top of the food chain. I feel no shame.
Wait a minute, it's a circle. Bacteria have just as much right to claim they're at the "top" of the food chain as you do. Maybe more, since they eat *everything* eventually.
In severe famines, yes. In conditions of extreme deprivation, killing a stranger to feed him/her to yourself, and especially your family and your children, becomes an extremely moral act.
You can see how utility scales with distance and situation by seeing how people react when you put one of their loved ones in front of the trolley problem, and then their friends, and then their countrymen, while putting other things on the other fork.
Please keep in mind that there's a difference between killing an animal and subjecting them to hundreds/thousands of hours of pain and suffering. Are they conscious of being in pain? Yes. Are they conscious of suffering? Yes.
Even if this were true, and I'm very dubious of this, I'm not sure pain morally obliges me to stop eating meat. How and in what way does empathy oblige me morally to care?
The kind that involve the creatures that came up with the concept. Humans. Not the kind that anthropomorphically applies that concept to creatures that don't understand it in any context outside a disney movie. Animals.
So, what about a proto-human. Something not smart enough to have a real system of ethics, but are on the cusp of evolving to be. How many generations away from that would you need to consider them a being deserving of empathy? What if there was some chance it would grow up to be capable of ethical reasoning? would 5% chance be enough? 50%? I have further discussion on this, but in the interest of not making a “gotchya” argument, I personally view babies on about the moral level of someone’s pet dog, so I’m interested if I can argue you into this position
Proto-human? You mean...like a fetus? Whoa....let's slow down...way down...we don't want to tread into that territory of things "on the cusp of evolving to be." All sorts of uncomfortable questions suddenly pop up like 'where is the cusp' or 'evolving to be' what?
Let's use dolphins instead. Maybe dolphins will someday have their own civilization in like 5-10 million years. At that point I'm willing to consider not eating them. Till then they're fair game.
i can see how being able to come up with a concept of morality and to think morally is relevant in deciding who is a moral agent, but i cannot see how it is relevant in determining who has moral standing. what is it about being able to act morally that makes it matter how we treat a creature?
So you're implying humans have more "moral standing" than animals? If that's what you're implying then you're proving one of my morality spectrums. The spectrum that allows us the ability to use animals how we want and to use them how we want morally.
I think this is one of the few posts I have seen on this site that has genuinely shocked me. I hope that you are arguing this in the hypothetical. Pain is a readily recognisable 'bad', and should not be knowingly imposed on others that will suffer from it for no reason. The species of the 'others' is of no consequence. Empathy is not the issue. Quality of life is.
Besides the "depth" of consciousness, there is another consideration: How often the consciousness is "on". I believe there's pretty widespread agreement humans aren't conscious when they are asleep for instance, but personally, I'm not at all convinced all humans are conscious every moment of wakefulness. Since consciousness can only be observed through introspection ("am I conscious? seems like I am"), is there evidence that humans are conscious outside of their most reflective moments?
All of this is so difficult and muddled I can't claim a high subjective probability, but I have difficulty fitting what-we-call-consciousness (which I can confirm as a real phenomenon through introspection, but don't know if it has all or even many of the properties philosophers tend to assign to the concept) in my reductionist worldview as something else than consequence of self-referentiality in a sufficiently complex system, and consequently, I wouldn't expect my consciousness to be there unless I am thinking about whether I am conscious. Furthermore, it seems that human brain asleep almost never passes whatever it takes for consciousness to emerge, which to me tentatively suggests the threshold for it to happen is pretty high, and for what it's worth, waking up from intense concentration/flow subjectively feels similar to when I'm drifting in and out of sleep.
Due to all the complications and uncertainties, my subjective probability for this one model is low (<10%), but I consider it more likely than any other individual model that goes into same amount of detail, and consequently I tentatively operate under belief that all humans are only rarely what-we-call-conscious, some humans (such as children) are probably never conscious, and that there is a good chance that no species outside Homo has ever possessed what-we-call-consciousness.
Of course, when it comes to attempts to calculate utility, you ought to factor in all other possibilities, many of which include non-human animal consciousness, even that it is very widespread, and that their experience is MORE vivid than that of humans (possibly due to humans having greater ability to inhibit their emotions).
In the same kind of sense how plants or mechanical automata we are almost certain aren't conscious can react to stimulus analogous to pain, all the time. That seems uncontroversial.
Other than that, I'm not at all sure (just like I'm not at all sure humans aren't conscious during most moments of wakefulness). I would perhaps expect torture to repeatedly jolt the pain and awareness of your miserable situation you're in to center of the brain's attention, which ought to result in conscious experience, not unlike how I've thought about my own experience when I'm completely absorbed in something (those moments where you metaphorically and perhaps actually don't even notice the passage of time) up until I perhaps miss a step and hurt myself a little and notice I definitely am conscious and in pain, but on the other hand, I know there are lots of hurts I've been able to tune out of eventually even when cause persists. Presumably, torture methods tend to be torture not only because of the intensity of the pain but partly because they are the most difficult to tune out of, so, operating under this model, I would perhaps expect the tortured to be conscious a lot of the time, more than people usually are.
This seems very plausible to me. But it also makes me suspect that "consciousness" isn't really the morally significant thing. Preference satisfaction is good, and preference frustration is bad, whether or not someone is conscious of having it. It's better for a parent if they think their kid has died but the kid is actually living a fruitful life, than if they think their kid is living a fruitful life but the kid has actually died - even though the parent will have happier consciousness in the latter case than the former.
i wrote a dialogue in the old style about this exact problem (do we have duties to lifeless objects?), which you may be interested in reading. as a taster, here is one of the epigraph quotes:
> Thales, according to Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus, was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae, the noblest Phoenician descendants of Cadmus and Agenor. […] Aristotle and Hippias say that he attributed souls even to inanimate objects, arguing from the magnet and from amber.
My thought is that somehow we have to settle how strong various preferences are, in order to determine how important it is to satisfy them. (For instance, my desire to live is stronger than the desire of the homophobe that I die, so at least on those two fronts, it is better for me to live.) My though is that however this works out, in order for a Roomba to have preferences that amount to even a small fraction of those of a chicken, it would have to be much more complex and lifelike than it actually is. But this is very much something that isn't yet worked out, and could conceivably go very weird, as you suggest.
> It's better for a parent if they think their kid has died but the kid is actually living a fruitful life, than if they think their kid is living a fruitful life but the kid has actually died - even though the parent will have happier consciousness in the latter case than the former.
well, it's better _for the child_ if the child is living, but i think it's better _for the parent_ if they think their kid is living even if that is false. of course it's much more important for the child to be alive than it is for the parent to think their child is alive, so it shakes out similarly anyway.
I think if you ask any parent about this, they would say that it is better *for them* if their child lives and they have a false belief about it, than the other way around. They care about how their child is actually doing more than they care about their own experience of it.
How could consciousness be on a spectrum? I mean, if we take as a crude operational definition "consciousness" = "being self-aware" how could you be, say, 20% or 4% self-aware? Seems like you either are or you're not, full stop.
How would I know? So far as I know, I have always been self-aware, because by definition I am not aware of any time when I was not. How could I be? So the question cannot be answered from the inside.
One might attempt to infer an answer from the outside, meaning someone else could try to decide whether I was experiencing self-awareness by examining the evidence of how I look and act. That is a notoriously difficult problem, as for example the problem of comas, "locked-in" states, and badly brain-damaged people (or the cognitive development of children) demonstrates.
But that would not demonstrate the spectrum at all, because *first* you need to write down a definition of "20% self-aware" that can be compared to the evidence. It's that point I'm challenging. I'd like to hear a good definition of "20% self-aware" before I admit it's any less illogical than "20% pregnant".
Have you ever been so tired that you can't maintain coherent thought and even though you are awake and observing your surroundings, you miss multiple details regarding the world around you? Like really obvious things like "who is in the room with me" or "what was I doing just now?" Or perhaps you have been drunk or high to the extent that you barely feel anything. What if an animal lived its life in a fog similar to these states, with no moments of higher thinking/observation/reasoning. Would they still be "equally self aware" as a human in a yes/no spectrum?
To me the answer seems obvious that consciousness is a spectrum.
If the OP meant "higher thinking" = clever and accurate reasoning, rich spectrum of thought, emotional vibrancy -- they he should have said so. But none of that is subsumed under "consciousness." In all of the states you describe, consciousness (meaning self-awareness) exists. I cannot think of situations in which a person is *not* self-aware (being asleep, or in a coma, or under anesthesia, or arguably with certain kinds of brain injury), and I can think of situatiosn in which a person *is* self-aware, but I cannot think of a single example in which a person is 20% self-aware. None of your examples fits, because none of them involve *self*-awareness -- they are all about being aware of the environment, or having a strong or more nuanced interaction with it.
Indeed, I would say the variation in awareness of the environment of which you speak can easily be ascribed to *non* self-aware organisms. A pine tree or single-celled organism can be attuned to it surroundings better or worse, can react to them functionally or not, and at different levels of complexity depends on its internal state (e.g. sick or healthy).
I would put a pig's level of self awareness much higher than that. They are more self-aware than the average dog, and have both the ability to see into the future and plan, and also - I believe - a demonstrable sense of humour. If more people got to know pigs personally, no one would eat pork.
It is one of life's great tragedies that pigs are so tasty. If they tasted terrible, we would most certainly be keeping more of them as companion animals. They are somewhat parrot-like in their appetite for companionship, physical pleasure, and pure mischief.
I raised chickens for years and came to the opposite conclusion. And they have noticable individual personalities. They seemed to be getting a kick out of life. Now ducks, they are stupid.
I strongly concur. I've also had a lot to do with chickens and I believe them to both have individual personalities, and also to be superbly well equipped to be outstanding at all the things that chickens need to do to live good lives and make more chickens.
Chickens approach the problems of life with zest and vigour.
They do, however tend to suffer from the same problem that sheep do - the bigger the flock/herd, the lower the (apparent) collective IQ. So people will rarely - if ever - see them express their full potential in the huge agglomerations that factory farming demands.
Apologies for giving a very serious answer to a fun comment, but before taking this line of reasoning very seriously, consider how it sounds applied to humans with severe mental handicaps. They have very low IQ, but that doesn't necessarily mean they suffer much less than a higher-IQ person (caviat: I have no expertise in neuroscience or anything like that).
The point being, I think I prefer lines of reasoning centered around physical measurements such as neuron count or connectedness, rather than the perception of intelligence manifested by the organism, since I don't think we have a strong intuition for how behavior maps to neural complexity or internal states.
Isn't that the implicit premise of Scott's blog in general? Of trying to convince or inform anyone of anything? Of, I don't know, waking up instead of not?
There's a chance that nihilism is "correct" but it's absolutely certain that it's a total bore
That's fair. But I'd argue that any sort of rumination - any attempt to examine the costs, measure them, compare them, and then make an informed decision consistent with one's values - leaves the individual (and, in the case of someone like Scott, the individual's audience) more aware of the consequences of their actions. Surely we agree that that's just an absolute good?
Consider this: what if, say, all ASX readers scale back their chicken consumption, reducing domestic demand, which in turn lowers prices for chicken, and the result is merely that more chicken is eaten in developing countries like China, because its price relative to alternative protein sources has fallen?
A similar line of thinking is frequently deployed to argue that the US shouldn't do anything to reduce its carbon emissions. It's nonsensical there and it's nonsensical here. We can't control what China does, but we can control what we do, and we have a responsibility to exercise that control in service of a better world.
More broadly, this kind of "what if far-fetched second-order consequence X?" thinking is a terrible way to make decisions because a) it's impossible to prove that consequence X won't happen and b) the supply of potential consequences is infinite. If you go down that road you'll never do anything.
I don't see it as non-sensical at all. If one is going to engage in some kind of self-deprivation in order to achieve a desired outcome, but the actions of others preclude our desired outcome, then asking whether self-deprivation is really worth continuing is a perfectly logical question. I think of it as similar to the whole fossil fuel divestment movement: there was no way a bunch of college kids were going to crimp Exxon's profits by getting their university endowment funds to dump the stock; there were too many other willing buyers for it.
As to your second paragraph, the interactions of supply and demand are hardly far-fetched! Think again!
The first is that it's impossible to know what the actions of others will be, and whether or not those actions would preclude the desired outcome, but we do know that our desired outcome will never be achieved if we just keep perpetuating the status quo. (You'd have to change your behavior at *some* point, or you'd risk being the last person keeping the factory chicken farms going.) This certainty gap tips the balance in favor of action.
The second is that if we want to begin to influence the behavior of others, taking the action we want them to take ourselves first is a prerequisite. No one's going to listen to utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism coming from someone who's housing a KFC Double Down.
Finally - are you *sure* the fossil fuel divestment movement hasn't accomplished its aims? Exxon's stock is down 32% over the last 5 years, while the S&P500 is up almost exactly 100%. An activist hedge fund (Engine No. 1) just successfully convinced shareholders, over Exxon's objections, to appoint at least 2 new renewables/energy transition-focused directors to the board (which has 12 seats IIRC). Was this the direct result of some college kids staging some sit-ins? Impossible to say. But aren't you glad you live in a world where they did something, rather than nothing?
Your ability to influence the behavior of others is highly limited. It'd be foolish not to recognize this is the case.
As for that last part, yes we can be sure. Exxon is effectively a victim of it's own success. Thanks mostly to new extraction methods like fracking and tar sands boiling (or whatever they call it) US oil production soared over the past decade, driving prices down. See here:
Not really germane to your point, but I happen to be an Exxon/Mobil stockholder, and have followed the stock closely for years. My opinion is that the current price of XOM slightly underrepresents its real value. The stock has traded for most of this decade at a P/E of about 10-15, which is conservative and normal. The company had negative earnings this year, but the expectation for next year is that P/E will be back around 10-15. Solid stuff.
The behaviour of the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, however, is absurd, having risen from a P/E of about 15 to its current level of about 45. That is delusional.
I don't think divestment has much power to reduce stock price. There's plenty of money controlled by people willing to move it into undervalued stocks regardless of ethical concerns.
At least from a deontological point of view, it's rather bizarre to argue that it's okay to perform an act if someone else would have done it. Is it okay to rob a jewelry store if someone else would have if you hadn't? A few hundred years ago, would you have accepted the defense "If I didn't do it, someone else would" from a slave trader?
I dont think its absurd, but the "correct" answer, in my view, is the U.S.A curbing its meat consumption is likely to encourge China to curb its meat consumption at least a little and, is a problem that can be worked on concurrently.
I agree with arpanet's other points, but as a more direct response: from what I know about Econ 101 For Dummies, a reduce in demand shouldn't result in a supply increase outside of unusual scenarios. If a bunch of people decide to buy N units less of chicken, then yes, the price of chicken will fall to compensate, incentivizing more people to buy it. However, if you do the Econ 101 math, assume your supply and demand curves are mostly linear, and assume that your chickens are spherical, the net change will still lower the quantity of chickens supplied. You'd need a pretty unusual supply curve (concave up) to get a net increase in production.
Perhaps there could be some unexpected nth order effect where if the price of chicken falls and the demand for it overseas rises, it'll cause some sort of feedback loop in the popularity of chicken, resulting in a supply increase in the long run. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, though, I think it's best to default to the position that chicken (+other animal products) is an ordinary good that follows the usual rules of supply and demand.
If fewer people buy chicken, the economics will move to a different point in the supply-demand curve. If there is less demand, there will be less supply (dead chickens). Others consuming more in response to a lower price is not going to result in a total cancellation of that effect.
That would make sense if the supply of chicken was somehow fixed (e.g. if production were extremely difficult to scale down). I don't see any reason why that would be the case. When supply can go down, lower demand will make it go down.
If it's a "safe" district, then for all practical purposes no. If it's a "swing" district, then your chances of being the deciding vote are actually similar to what they'd be if the election was decided by picking a single random ballot. (Yes, wins by one ballot are rare, but only as rare as you'd expect given the sizes of electorates. They've happened in significant elections before.)
My point is that many of us know that our individual votes don't matter, for all practical purposes, and yet we do it anyway, because it's an action that's consistent with our values.
I'm replying that "my individual vote doesn't matter" is genuinely false for a close-looking election! *Probably* it won't come down to one vote, but in an N-vote election whose polls put a tie within the margin of error, there's more than a 1/N chance that it will in fact come down to one vote. I can go into the Central Limit Theorem if you really want to dispute this.
(And if you're like "but recounts and legal battles", the same marginal reasoning also applies to whether, and how soon, recounts or legal battles get resolved.)
Sure, people often *think* it doesn't matter. But that's different.
The vote percentages have to be very close, or the number of voters small. If there are a million voters and one candidate has a one percent advantage, the probability of a tie is miniscule.
This is one of the common misconceptions: you don't come into Election Day knowing what the vote percentages will be.
It isn't flipping a 51% coin a million times and then adding one. It's flipping a coin a million times when your prior evidence only says that its weight is somewhere from 48% to 52%, and then adding one.
The negligible leverage from the worlds in which the weight is not very near 50-50 are countered by the high leverage in the worlds where the weight is very near 50-50.
I always look at it like a Newcomb problem. I need all of the people who think like me to show up to the polls. I think my personal decision will be reflexively consistent with the group. Therefor I need to go to the polls.
> because it's an action that's consistent with our values.
Not really, it's coordination. If I go vote, that means people with thought processes / beliefs / values closest to mine will also be more likely to go vote. If I don't, that means they're not likely to go either.
IMO spreading awareness of superrationality would fix a lot of stuff.
1. Say there is some load reduction of 10,000 less people per year that the poultry industry is sensitive to, and your cutting out of the consumption of chicken has a 1/10,000 probability of being being the reduction that hits the cutoff. Norcross says it's still sensible, as although the chance of individual action itself is the tipping point, the harm reduction is quite large. He akins this to us wearing seatbelts in cars and having oxygen masks and safety vests on airplanes. The small risk of great harm still outweighs whatever cost it takes to implement these policies.
2. Contributing your reduction of chicken consumption reduces the amount of time it will take to hit the critical load of 10,000 that will cause an industry response to downscale poultry production.
The 10,000 value is arbitrary, but there is some value N where this occurs.
But the background fluctuation is independent of your moral choice to not eat chicken, right? So I'm not sure why the extra noise would change the sign or the magnitude of your impact.
I _think_ the premise is more like "My hypothesis is that the noise present in the background fluctuation of annual meat consumption completely swamps any individuals' contribution".
That makes no sense. I expect the background rate of murder to fluctuate, but that doesn't mean that me killing someone doesn't increase the number of people murdered. And in terms of autantonym's characterization of your argument, the number of murders "completely swamps" my individual contribution. This seems like a combination of "everybody's doing it" and "shoplifting is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark".
This seems like a really good point. The original statement "Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten," is highly misleading. Your choice to eat chicken or not is *not* a choice about whether some chickens get to live happy lives instead of being slaughtered for food. Instead, in the long-run equilibrium, the actual choice is whether the chickens are alive *at all* in the first place.
(The answer to your question about "individual dietary changes" is simply ordinary marginal economics. On the margin, a drop in demand will cause a drop in supply.)
If demand for chickens rises, then chicken farmers will breed and raise more of them. If demand falls, then fewer chickens will live. The actual choice you need to make is whether it is better for a chicken to exist at all (and then be slaughtered for food) -- or else never exist in the first place. There is *no* outcome where you get a large supply of happy free-range chickens that die of old age.
Maybe you'd rather there never be any chickens at all, than that they exist in factory farmed conditions. That's a plausible position, but I didn't see it discussed in the original post.
Yes, and we should also consider breeding millions of homo sapient replicants to slave away on the outer planets. Because clearly, not breeding them would be a moral hazard in itself.
The mere addition paradox is a serious issue in ethical philosophy. I find your sarcastic dismissal of someone bring up relevant points inappropriately rude.
My comment does point to a serious analogous application of the base logic. The sarcasm in my comment is indeed rude. I take back the sarcasm, but I'd like to keep the comment please.
Are you familiar with the phrase "mere addition paradox" or "repugnant conclusion"? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ This is a well-known concept, especially in this community. Both Don Geddis' and your comment are retreading this ground.
I had looked it up after the first time you had mentioned it. And, you were right, my initial comment as a reply to Don's was inappropriate (sorry Don Geddis). I had conflated his comment with a few others that were less developed/nuanced.
In regards to the application of the "mere addition paradox", in this case I'm not sure a lot of the assumptions of that theory would apply. The theory was grounded in human populations versus engineered non-human populations whose subjects have no agency and may have 0 excess to happiness and are subjected to a large X amount of suffering. In order to attempt to extend the repugnant conclusion to include such a group would require a really really really really really really long comment/post.
At least that's how I think it would stand as applied to factory farming, which was more or less the subject of SA's article.
But, as Don had suggested in his comment, there's a difference between free range farming and factory farming, and consequently with how one would approach the ethics in question.
If we don't eat cows, pigs, chickens, etc, they're not going to be released into the wild to frolic freely. None of these are wild animals any longer; some of them have been so changed by selective breeding that they cannot survive at all without human intervention.
I think "if you can create a life, you should" to be a morally dubious position, but the choice isn't "happy cow or dead cow?" The choice is "dead cow or no cow?"
I understand the argument, but it ignores the fact that wild animals exist and compete with domestic animals for land use. Plus all the second order environmental harms of animal agriculture.
Cutting down the rainforests in order to farm more cattle or grow more soy to feed cattle with can be justified as benefiting humans and maybe even cows, but it comes at the expense of lots of other forms of life.
Most wild animals are not frolicking but living pretty short grim lives full of suffering followed by a painful death.
If you were to take a well managed free range farm, and rewild it, this would almost certainly result in a decrease in animal well-being / increase in suffering.
The problem with Scott's chicken v beef question is that it doesn't take into account the farming method, which makes a huge difference to the environmental and ethical impacts.
That's a reasonable point, arguments like this are why I'm a fairly half-hearted vegetarian (I was keeping to it fine for the last few months but I just ate a leftover sausage roll). If the majority of meat came from free range farms and not from factory farms, I'd be much more comfortable eating meat (although since that would make meat much more expensive, so I probably still wouldn't eat much of it). I just think the trade-off between agriculture and wild environments is worth pointing out, since the idea that destroying the environment is good actually is a perspective held only by a very small number of people.
Since you could also argue that most humans are living long grim lives full of suffering followed by a painful death, I'm not sure where this line of thinking leads except to the nihilistic conclusion that we'd all be better off if we were dead. I'm not in favour of suffering, I just tend to think it's a price worth paying for continuing to live.
I'm unsure if opposing factory farming in light of this is philosophically coherent, I guess I assume most animals have evolved to tolerate the suffering they experience in their natural environment (since those that couldn't cope would go extinct), but the overcrowding of factory farms seem to be a step above that. On the other hand, unlike animals in the wild they're generally not starving since that's bad for business.
Conditions for cattle on the whole seem better than those for chickens, I see cows grazing in fields quite often and they seem pretty content to me, so that's probably worth factoring in. I don't buy meat, but I do consume dairy but not eggs for this exact reason (and also my enduring love of cheese, but I want to pretend there's a moral justification for it).
Others are dismissing this argument, but I think it raises the real crux of the issue. We as consumers need to continue demanding higher levels of animal welfare and we need to demand our government continues to increase the levels of transparency in animal husbandry.
I personally, despite being a strong libertarian, actually do favor stronger animal welfare regulations. I think it fits into a "tragedy of the commons" framework along the lines of many other consumer protection type regulations.
The need for full vegetarianism/veganism declines substantially if we get rid of factory farming. We don't need to force these species to extinction, we just need to stop torturing them.
Right. I am a vegetarian but if I knew that animals were raised in an environment where they lived good lives that ended in one bad day I would be much more likely to eat meat. And honestly given how hard it is to convince people to give up meat I think it is a shame that groups in favor of animal welfare don't push in this direction.
Sorry to interrupt your discussion of an important ethical dilemma, but in practice, "a large supply of happy free-range chickens that die of old age" isn't implausible at all. Chickens lay eggs, cows produce milk. That's enough reason to keep raising them, even if the whole of humanity collectively decides to go vegetarian tomorrow.
The chickens and cows that are being killed would not exist if not for meat-eating. The existence of other chickens and cows not being raised for meat is irrelevant. (Also, domestication brings specialization. Broilers and layers are different breeds of chickens, and beef and dairy are different breeds of cattle.)
While it is plausible you could raise eggs and milk without doing so they both also require quite a bit of killing since males are pretty much worthless for milk and eggs and don't justify being fed into old age.
Several problems if we want to get into the plausibility of this:
- Free-range is a fairly low bar to clear and doesn't guarantee animal welfare.
- Male chickens don't lay eggs, keeping them around is twice as expensive as killing them.
- Egg laying declines over time, so waiting for hens to die of old age is much more expensive than just disposing of them as soon as egg production starts to drop (you can kill them or give them away for free, that's where some of my parents pet chickens came from - scrawny looking things, but good egg-layers!).
- Some animals will die from injuries or disease rather than old age (seems obvious but this can massively affect welfare).
There was an adversarial collaboration on SSC on the ethics of eating meat. One of the authors started with the position that maybe we should buy more meat, so that there are more factory animals, as their existence is a net positive, but in the process of collaboration came to the conclusion that the state in which farmed chickens exist is worse than death. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/
Beyond Meat and other food tech startups and other companies producing vegan/vegetarian products are entirely supported by there being enough consumers that have switched their individual dietary changes.
Isn't that machine more efficient than a cow? Honest question. I thought that was part of the appeal, was that it required significantly fewer inputs to just grow a burger in a lab than to grow a whole cow and then slice/dice accordingly.
The answer is more equivocal than either one of us would like. Here is the most thorough paper I have found on the topic. It's a little hard to discern the answer one way or another. You have to taken into account long-term versus short-term, CO2 versus methane, geography of meat production, and a whole lot of other variables that I don't fully understand. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full
That paper is about cultured meat, which is an "emerging technology" (I would say "vaporware") that involves growing actual cow cells into a cow steak in the lab, with no living cow ever being involved. So far as I can tell this is not actually possible yet, and certainly not producing food for the supermarkets.
Beyond Meat, the substitute mentioned by OP, is a classic meat-substitute product made from vegetable food inputs like soy via food engineering. Unlike cultured meat, this is actually available in stores now, but its carbon footprint is not addressed by that paper.
Sure but that's a fairly limited scenario. There are a whole lot of farms dedicated to producing feed for animals that could just as well produce food for humans.
This is an interesting potential pivot. Is CO2 the only environmental evil that matters? What about degradation of land by working what should be fallow farmland --or the depletion of potable water that is diverted to agriculture. Plus, some crops are sustainable and others not. The component parts of "veggie meat" may themselves present significant environmental costs (I am not sure which crops are most impactful or which go into v. meat) All of these (and many more that I am not expert enough to elaborate) may make this a more complicated dilemma.
CO2 is critical to reduce --but water is critical to conserve and keep accessible. We see this exact issue in Florida where, despite our state-wide, near perpetual drought, a great deal of our aquifer and our main source of water from Lake Okeechobee is being diverted to sugar farms across the state. Even if those were soy bean farms, is that an apt trade-off?
Plus, the warming of great swaths of farmland is changing the growing environment. So far indoor agriculture is too limited for global industrial use. These are not ancillary to the question of what is more responsible to eat from an Earth-preserving standpoint.
Lab-grown meat is currently just barely less CO2 intensive than cow-grown meat.
But my understanding is that most of the energy inputs come from the grid, so with more nuclear, solar, and wind, it can become significantly less CO2-intensive.
" Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less non-renewable energy, has >99%less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef. "
I took a look at it. It is about a different question. Tissue culture meat vs conventional beef. The source I linked to addresses the difference in footprint between a Beyond Beef pea protein based burger and a beef burger.
You are right to point out the conflict of interest h/o the production of pea/vegetable protein has a lower footprint than meat protein[1][2].
It would be a little shocking if a reduction in aggregate demand for a certain kind of meat didn't impact production eventually, though presumably there'd first be a price shift which over time leads to reductions in i.e. new factory starts.
Depending on the elasticity of demand in the rest of the market, a minority segment that stops consuming for moral/ideological reasons might well just lead to increased consumption by the other consumers, as price drops.
How could it not? Surely the chicken supply curve isn't perfectly inelastic, so shifting the demand curve should on average reduce the amount sold and thus the amount produced. (Similarly, it's hard to believe that you save one chicken for every chicken you refuse to eat, because surely the chicken supply curve isn't perfectly elastic.)
I know that only thinking in terms of the pure supply & demand curves doesn't capture all relevant info. But unless you have a concrete counterargument and empirical evidence that the reduced demand is somehow perfectly balanced out by something else despite elasticity in price, I think the strong presumption should be that it causes fewer pounds of chicken to be produced.
(Note: I forgot to include the demand elasticity, but my conclusion is the same — I'm guessing the demand isn't perfectly elastic, so I'm guessing refusing to eat a chicken, on average, saves more than 0 (but less than 1) chickens.)
The curves are simply that mechanisms through the obvious fact "if fewer people pay farmers to raise chickens, then farmers will raise fewer chickens" is implemented. If I go out and buy a chicken, either a chicken that otherwise wouldn't get raised and killed does get raised and killed, or someone who would otherwise have bought a chicken doesn't do so. We need only ask whether it makes sense to assume the latter holds in all cases.
Yeah I agree it's immediately obvious that buying less chicken should do some combination of (a) reducing the amount of chicken raised and killed, and (b) reducing the price of chicken to entice more people to buy it.
The benefit of thinking in terms supply and demand curves for me is that it visually reveals an important, not-immediately-obvious fact (at least not to me!). Namely, that the answer to "what's the tradeoff between (a) and (b)?" depends on the price-elasticities of the supply and demand of chicken. In particular, once you see that, it becomes hard to believe it will be zero of (a) and all of (b).
On the margin, in expectation, it's basically guaranteed they will. That is, if a million people giving up chicken entirely would result in the shutting down of some chicken factory farms—and it would—then each incremental person giving it up makes ever-so-slightly more likely (averaged across all the randomness) that one of the factory farms will be shut down.
I eat chicken and not beef because I don't believe in eating something I could not personally kill. Also, I try to only buy free-range chickens, which I think minimizes the suffering. It is too bad that PETA turned evil.
Hmm, I dunno - regardless of the tool situation, the cow stands a much better chance of defeating me than the chicken, if we assume it's a fight to the death.
I figure either animal will try to escape rather than fight back.
I have no experience with live chickens, but once in Boy Scouts we thought it would be fun to scare some cattle. They outnumbered us by a wide margin but made no attempt to fight or scare us in return.
If it's a cow with calf, stay the heck away. Cows with young calves are very protective and will attack if they feel threatened. I don't know if the cattle you tried to scare as a kid were heifers or bullocks, but a herd won't do much - mostly. Though it's always more prudent to make sure you are not surrounded by them or have clear space to get away. https://www.hsa.ie/eng/Your_Industry/Agriculture_Forestry/Livestock/
I don't remember if they had calves. I guess not. We chased them into the woods and then somehow got surrounded by cattle running in all directions. For one scary moment a bull ran right toward me; then it noticed me and turned aside.
For me this seems like an even better reason to eat the cow, It's her or me!
Seriously though, in terms of the great-grandparent post, I think that the "argument from personal squeamishness" is not all that effective for me. I know that I, as a sheltered city-dweller, would feel bad if I actually had to personally kill the animals I eat. On the other hand, I also know that if it came down to a situation where I _had_ to, then I'd probably feel really bad the first time, slightly less bad the second time, and by the hundredth time I'd be as desensitised to slaughtering animals as any farmer.
A lost of animals do fight each other, despite the danger. And when it comes to dealing with a predator, fighting is preferable to being eaten. But once an animal is domesticated, getting eaten is actually evolutionarily beneficial. Cattle that fight getting eaten don't get bred (and yeah, if they do get eaten, obviously they don't get bred after that, but their relatives do).
I think the point Bullseye was making is that while a lot of animals do fight, it is relatively uncommon for fights to be to the death. Behaviors differ amongst animals of course but IIRC in many animals once it is clear who is likely to win in a fight the would-be loser surrenders. I believe this is how heirarchy is decided in some primates and how mating and territory rights are decided by animals such as sealions.
In lieu of payment? Sure, I suppose I'd be willing to do that once or twice. Eventually, I imagine I'd just as soon pay for my meat in money rather than time.
Given that one of our field trips was to the local slaughterhouse... some people will be very badly affected by knowing where meat comes from. Other people won't. Aesthetic arguments are poor ones and probably work better for people who have little to no contact with farm animals. Kids may be squeamish about learning that the cute lambs or whatever will end up as meat in the butcher's window, but that's life.
What kind of school (and at what ages) is bringing students to a slaughterhouse? Just wondering where it diverges so significantly from my suburban American public standard-bearing of comfortable fantasy.
Of course. We have live chickens in markets in East Asia. It's morally irresponsible not to see the animal you are about to eat. Also tastes better too, since you know it's fresh.
People used to bring chicks home to raise themselves, then eat on the dinner table. Families in many rural areas have a little coop in the backyard for a few chickens.
By this logic (if I'm understanding correctly), digestion is immoral. If I had to look at my stomach digesting all the food I ate, I'd probably starve to death.
Absolutely everything about the inside of living things disgusts me immensely. The fact that people don't like thinking about where their food comes from doesn't need to reflect anything more profound than that
People should be less squeamish and more willing to accept reasonable cruelty and disgustingness in general. Squeamishness is reflective of a lack of curiosity and self-reflection.
Squeamishness is not reflective of a good moral character.
Killing a chicken is a surprisingly personal experience, because you have to be so physically (and thus psychologically) close to the bird when it dies. You are holding the bird with one hand and the axe with the other; it's a very personal act of violence.
Killing a cow is more physically distant, thanks to guns, and was much less traumatising to our cows because they were always positioned in such a way that they died in the middle of snacking on something particularly tasty.
Both kinds of death always made me give a small prayer of thanksgiving to whatever gods may be, and the soul of the animal.
Death up close (as with birth) is a palpably sacred event, and not to be taken lightly.
Personally, I did not become desensitised to death. I became better at making it happen, but I never became able to shrug it off as routine. The people who work as the 'knockers' (the ones who do the actual killing) in abattoirs are widely known to be a very specialised kind of personality; I'm not sure that most ordinary people become as blasé about taking lives as some have assumed. Over time I have become more averse to killing, not less. It is quite a profound act.
BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how you plan to humanely kill a cow with an axe. I expect you could do it if you had to, but it wouldn't be very easy. Nor very kind to the cow. They are big, and opinionated, and your chances of hitting anything important on the first swing are... not good. Maybe if it was baled up in a crush and couldn't move, and you hit it on the forehead with the back of the axe to stun it? Then cut its throat with a very sharp knife?
How would you tranquilise an animal prior to slaughter, without then ending up consuming the tranquiliser yourself?
Also, the process of tranquilising the animal would, in all likelihood be more traumatic than shooting it where it stands.
A humane death is completely possible without tranquiliser, as long as it considers the animal's comfort, and is swift. Factory farming hasn't made either of those things a priority, unfortunately.
You can kill either pretty trivially. Cows get shot in the head. Chickens you put upside down in this funnel thing and stick an ice pick looking tool their neck
Most cows also die by bleeding. They have their spinal cord severed from their brain and then their carotid artery cut. This is largely to comply with kosher rules, since few meat producers can afford two separate slaughter productions.
Yes--thank you for correction! The bolt gun causes a sort of concussion or a penetrating wound at the brain stem. Your point may be a better articulated answer than mine --but in the absence of editing capability...... :-(
I'm under the impression that most meat producers in the US make no attempt to comply with kosher rules, hence why most meat sold isn't certified kosher and why kosher meat is always from a dedicated brand.
I don't understand the rationale. Are you unconcerned about the suffering caused by introducing additional demand for animal-raising into the system by purchasing the chickens? It's hard for me to wrap my mind around being more motivated by your "I couldn't personally kill" it principle, since it seems largely disconnected from the weighing of real-world consequences.
I mean, sure, it's not a utilitarian view - more of an honor system. Is your confusion because you accidentally assumed CG was utilitarian, or are you actually having difficulty understanding a deontological worldview?
Again that throws me for a loop, because you're putting other unwilling participants (draftees, civilians, third-party collateral damage, etc) through death and pain just because you're willing to go through it yourself.
You could say that death and suffering aren't the concern (it's a "deontological worldview" or whatever), but in that case what's the problem with war in the first place? Is war just concerning because it's aesthetically ugly? Just because society says it's bad or something? Is it really disconnected from death and suffering?
How did you come to adopt such a moral view? Your rule seems totally arbitrary to me. There's no cosmic notary that translates your abidance to any particular rule into anything beyond that: mere rule-following. Where is the value in creating and then abiding by rules if not to achieve some better outcomes in terms of conscious experience? And if achieving better outcomes is indeed the purpose of your rule-following, why pretend as if such rules as "don't eat an animal you personally couldn't kill" should apply so absolutely to achieve the best outcomes? Surely there's a more direct way of choosing the better of two possible courses of action than by consulting that particular rule, no? And surely there must be other rules you have that sometimes come into conflict? How do you determine which rules take precedence in any given situation? How do you come to determine what the rules are in the first place?
I eat chicken not beef for purely utilitarian reasons.
Nutritionally, the meat is more lean. Per gram of chicken you get *more* nutritional value per gram of beef (I feel like that could be factored Into the calculations in this article). There is also a higher content of essential amino acids, even after offsetting the fat content difference.
Additionally, chicken is cheaper by far. I can get one good steak for around $10usd, or I can get a whole bag of chicken breasts for the same price.
Chicken in my experience fits into more possible dishes. Everything that beef fits into, chicken can be substituted, but not vice-versa. Off the top of my head I can't think of any beef dishes meant to be served cold. You don't really see beef salads, or cold-beef pasta. I'm sure they exist, but it still seems more limited.
As far as the moral aspect goes, I have come to terms with the fact that an individuals consumption makes no difference towards production. "But if everybody did it..." is the common argument against this. If I were to go out campaigning against a form of consumption, and led a movement that affected others to change their consumption, then yes, leading by example may make a difference. But as an individual with no plan on affecting others via my consumption, I am practical and pragmatic about it. Sure I still feel bad about what is happening to animals I'm factory farming and the meat industry. However, I am at peace with my decision knowing that unless I create other factors I would only be denying myself nutrition, efficiency, and financial value to no other end.
Definitely the best option. Of course there is also the option of just cutting your meat consumption in half. Eat lots of nuts and seeds and you'll need less meat.
And, lacking a better place to say it, a PSA: "cage free" means they're all stacked in there as before, just without walls between them. "Pasture raised" means what most people think cage free means. "Free range" is something between those two (6 hours of 2 square feet). "Certified humane" means they're not lying about it when they say it's cage free, free range, or pasture raised.
And just to make it more complicated, all of this can differ in different countries. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I seem to remember that in the UK, 'free range' chickens have somewhat worse conditions than the chickens raised for 'free range' eggs. However, 'organic' chickens had living conditions on par with 'free range' eggs.
> Cage-free, a term regulated by the USDA, means that the eggs come from hens that, put simply, aren’t caged: They can “freely roam a building, room, or enclosed area with unlimited access to food and fresh water during their production cycle, but [do] not have access to the outdoors.”
Cage free then means 1.5 sq ft per hen and no ammonia odor. Your first link gives the typical non-cage-free cage size as 8.5x11, so cage free means 2.3x more space. So I was exaggerating a bit. Your second link shows pictures, which probably speak truer than the numbers as to what all this really means.
I avoid all moral ambiguity by just going with pasture raised. Costs a lot more than regular eggs, but still not that much in the grand scheme of things. Where this system breaks down is at the farmer's market, where the eggs have no label but the farmer swears they're treated nicely.
The maths of vegetarianism is no better. Dairy cows and laying chickens get killed at the end of their productive lives (when their production drops off and they're no longer profitable), they don't retire to the countryside. There's still plenty of animal suffering / death involved (in addition to the fate of the actual producing animals, male dairy cows are slaughtered very young and male chicks are disposed of after hatching (sometimes by being chucked into a grinder). In principle, it might be possible to have an ethical vegetarian system but in practice I'm not sure it's better than eating meat (it might work out better on a calories per animal death measure).
well, i think it is better, since omnivores usually eat dairy products in addition to meat. so vegetarianism, though it's far from perfect, should at least reduce demand for factory farming by half or something like that compared to omnivorousness. (i don't think it's likely that most vegetarians replace their lost meat intake with added dairy and egg, not to any great extent.)
Methane lasts in the atmosphere for 12 years. So a cow today is merely "replacing" the methane emitted by a cow in 2009. Which was replacing the methane from a cow in 1997. Replacing 1985. 1973. Etc.
Therefore eating beef today is not adding to greenhouse gas impacts on global warming, as long as the total number of cows is fairly level. It has been decreasing in my country for the last few decades so I feel no moral imperative whatsoever.
I would welcome arguments against this position. It seems to me like we expect everything to be net zero except cows, which must lead to reduced greenhouse gases.
You can apply the same exact logic to forestation and deforestation. A tree is only taking carbon from the environment while it's growing; once it's full size, it's carbon neutral. When you cut it down and burn it, you release all of that carbon back in the atmosphere. You cannot have a large forest, and say it compensates for X cows per year. You would have to keep planting new trees (and keep the old) to compensate.
The dynamics is mirrored, but the effect is cumulative. If we have a high number of cows and low number of trees, the warming effect is stronger, and the damage accumulates.
You eat less cows, the damage done is less.
And of course, this entirely ignores the fact that once an ecosystem collapses, no amount of reforestation and vegetarian diets will bring it back.
I think you're mistaken that trees stop absorbing CO2. They never really "stop growing", so they never stop absorbing CO2. (Even if they grow no taller, they still grow wider, which adds a lot of biomass each year.) In fact I believe "fully grown" trees absorb more CO2 per year than saplings and young trees.
Where does this ever growing accumulation of carbon go then? Do forests produce coal deposits over time? Or does it all just go back into the air next time that forest burns?
Sometimes a tree will burn, and it will be released that way. Most of the time it will decompose, and then the bacteria or fungi will release it that way. Every time, some bit of biomass goes back into the ground just due to the inefficiencies of the processes that will get it back in the air. The carbon cycle is the least aggressively stable of Earth's cycles; it wants to be a closed loop, and only gets rid of excess very slowly.
Just to tag onto Ravi D'Elia's answer, I think most forests will have a very slowly growing layer of soil under them, and this soil has some carbon in it. So it's not quite the same as producing coal deposits over time (I think that requires some pretty serious geology to happen on top of what used to be a forest) but it is a slow and steady carbon sequestration process.
When you cut down a piece of forest you also tend to damage the soil pretty severely, both directly with all your tree-cutting machines rolling over it, and indirectly by removing the trees which were holding it together, exposing it to the elements. This is why agriculture on 'reclaimed' rainforest needs to keep cutting into the rainforest: because the soil degrades rapidly when the trees aren't there.
Having written that, I realise that I don't see a way for this "carbon-rich soil getting churned up" to turn into "carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" so maybe it's not relevant to the discussion at hand...
This other Nature article reports on an interesting experiment in which the CO2 levels above 500m^2 plots of mature (90-year-old) eucalyptus forest were artificialy boosted by 150ppm. They found a 12% increase in CO2 uptake, of which 13% ended up as a net increase in the carbon stored in wood and soil:
These numbers are both on the low side, indicating the mature forests do indeed have a much lower net absorption of CO2 compared to younger forests (or grassland et cetera). But they're by no means carbon neutral.
My 2 minutes Google research just now suggests that methane is mainly "removed" from the atmosphere *by being converted into CO2*, which suggests to me that cows cause a long-term problem in a similar way to any other source of greenhouse gas.
If you believe otherwise, could you please explain the mechanism by which the methane stops causing greenhouse issues after 12 years? And also why you believe this mechanism "scales" in such a way that eliminating cows wouldn't allow us to "transfer" the benefits of this mechanism to some non-cow-generated problem instead.
My 2 minute research suggests that methane is a worse greenhouse gas per molecule and is only causing less climate change because it produced at a lower concentration. This means that converting methane into carbon dioxide does substantially ameliorate its greenhouse gas effect.
The carbon in that CO₂ comes from the plants the cow has eaten. Those plants regrow each year, converting CO₂ to various organic molecules using energy from sunlight. The cows then eat the plants, converting the organic compounds into beef, CO₂ and methane, and the methane is later converted to CO₂ too. Other animals would also produce a similar amount of CO₂. It looks pretty net-zero to me.
Methane isn't produced by cows or any other animal, it is produced by methanogenic bacteria which are ubiquitous in the environment, inside all creatures, in soil, on everything.
They produce methane as waste when digesting vegetation. That's good, otherwise the world would be smothered in dead veg, and all heterotrophs would starve.
Note that the veg will rot and produce methane no matter whether it passes through a gut or not. Once the plant has grown the methane is inevitable. Always has been.
There are also methanotrophs that eat methane. They are in the soil too. It's a natural cycle.
Much of the confusion and ideological posturing results from looking at parts of the system selected to support a cherished conclusion.
Not actually true; aerobic respiration doesn't produce methane. It's specifically *anaerobic* decomposition of matter that produces reduced gases like methane (and hydrogen, for that matter).
I'm not sure this makes sense. The immutables are the carbon and hydrogen atoms involved, not the specific form they are in, and different breakdown pathways could obviously result in more or less methane relative to CO2 + water. Even if you assume that all plant breakdown produces methane in the same proportion that a cow's gut does, you still have the increase in plant matter grown for the purpose of feeding the cows, which (under the assumption) is a CO2 + water --> methane process, and which would not happen in the counterfactual with less cows.
There's also the question of where all this carbon to make methane is coming from in the first place. If we are using petroleum to make fertilizer to grow feed to feed to cows, then I can see how this is a net increase in carbon. But if cows are creating methane from grass that captured carbon from the atmosphere, is there a net increase in carbon (and yes, methane has more of a greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, but methane eventually turns into carbon dioxide)?
No, there is no net increase in carbon. Even fertilizer synthesis only requires air, water, and energy. After all, bacteria do it. Air is 80% nitrogen. Water has all the hydrogen and oxygen needed for NH4 or NO3.
However, our technologies are a bit primitive still. That's a real issue, but we prefer to diddle around with these sorts of pretenses rather than do real thought work. We can pretend to be virtuous while evading any real effort.
Fertilizer doesn't supply carbon. It supplies reduced nitrogen. All the carbon in the grass that a cow eats comes from CO2 the grass pulled out of the atmosphere.
After doing a little bit of googling, it appears that hydrocarbons are used to provide hydrogen for fertilizer. The carbon isn't in the fertilizer, but presumably it's left over afterwards, and released into the atmosphere.
Wait what...? What hydrogen? The principal component of fertilizer is reduced nitrogen in various forms (e.g. ammonia or ammonium nitrate), plus phosphates, and sometimes assorted minerals, calcium and potassium salts, et cetera. Where are you getting "hydrogen?" Plants don't need hydrogen, or more generally reduced H. For that matter, in what form would it be? (Obviously not the gas...)
The only thing that occurs to me is you're looking at how ammonia itself is made, industrially, which is generally the Haber process with atmospheric N2 and H2 derived from steam reformation of methane (from natural gas mostly). That definitely uses fossil fuels, so it is a carbon-positive process, as are *all* processes that use fossil fuels, simply because you're withdrawing carbon form a long-term repository and sticking it back in the atmosphere as CO2. Is that what you mean? That's true, and it's why farming -- or almost any human activity is "carbon positive" -- because it uses fossil fuels to power it at some stage. But it doesn't have anything to do with where the methane in cow farts comes from. That comes form plant carbohydrates (mostly), and those come from atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis.
>The principal component of fertilizer is reduced nitrogen in various forms (e.g. ammonia or ammonium nitrate) ... Where are you getting "hydrogen?"
That would be from the *reduced* nitrogen, where "reduced" is basically chenical-ese for "attached to a bunch of hydrogen". Ammonia = NH3, ammonium nitrate = NH4NO3, so 2-3 hydrogen atoms per nitrogen atom. Which, since you didn't get the hydrogen by electrolyzing water, means 0.5-1.5 molecules of carbon dioxide out the exhaust for every atom's worth of reduced nitrogen in the fertilizer.
Yeah OK that's what I thought, you're thinking of how the ammonia was made in the first place. I was confused because this is not how farmers (or chemists) speak of what's "in" fertilizer.
Also by the way you're wrong about the detailed origins of the H. Half the H atoms *do* come from water, the other half from CH4, and the overall stoichiometry is 3/8 CO2 for every NH3.
My understanding is that the most important thing is not the cow chemistry but the land the cows are on. If you've got cows grazing on grass (or, more commonly, cows indoors being fed grain grown on a field), then you need a big piece of land growing either grass or grain. Both of these uses of land are much worse for carbon sequestration than most wild land types (forest is the obvious one, but even wild grass is surprisingly good).
So if you eat cows, you're creating a demand for an extremely sub-optimal use of land, which is net positive in terms of emissions compared to if you don't eat cows.
But also, the fact that you're temporarily turning carbon dioxide into methane for a decade or so is also significant. Ok, the methane isn't exactly building up, but it would still be better if it wasn't there. If we reduce our cow consumption, we reduce that temporary-but-constantly-replenished methane content of the atmosphere.
"It seems to me like we expect everything to be net zero except cows, which must lead to reduced greenhouse gases."
I don't think that's true. We want the sum of everything to be net zero. Which means either that each individual thing should be net zero, or some of them can be net positive while others need to be net negative to cancel out. In general, we want the easy things to make net negative to be net negative, and the things where we get lots of value from emissions to be net positive because those are very valuable.
Cows are one of the things where being net negative is relatively easy, while transport is something that is valuable enough to allow it to remain net positive and look for other things to be net negative.
Yeah, but if 1% of the world's population still wants to eat cows and chicken 1% as much as the average American currently does, then that's enough to keep the species extant but it still saves pretty much all of the climate and animal welfare costs.
My point is that you shouldn't use "I want to stop the species going extinct" as an excuse for eating chicken and beef. Unless aliens start firing vegan death-rays at Earth, the whole world isn't going to give up on chicken and beef at the same time as you.
+1, I don't think it's a problem for these species to go extinct, except for some kind of sentimental value or scientific curiosity. It's a problem when an individual being suffers and dies because it's sentient. But a species is an abstract concept; it's not sentient.
I would expect them to end up in a similar position as horses - not directly useful, but some people keep them for nostalgia/tourism value, in relatively good conditions.
I do think that extinction / very low population is a better outcome than factory farming / suffering.
I thought most beef cattle isn't factory farmed but instead spends most of their time outside.
It would seem like even with a stressful month on a feedlot most cows lives are probably better off than the average member of a quite a few wild species.
(It does seem true that pigs and chickens would be better off extinct)
> Most cattle raised for beef are castrated, de-horned, and branded, painful procedures often performed without any anesthesia. For seven months, calves graze on the range before they are transported to feedlots, where they are fattened on unnatural diets. Within six months, they reach market weight of 544 kg (1,200 lb) and are trucked to slaughter. As with other animals to be killed for food, cattle are not given any food, water, or protection from the elements during the journey.
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> [...]
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> Cattle suffer the same mistreatment as pigs during both their transport and slaughter. Additionally, typically during or after transport, some cattle can have difficulty getting up from a recumbent position. Nonambulatory cattle—referred to as “downers” by the industry—are animals who collapse for a variety of metabolic, infectious, toxic, and/or musculoskeletal reasons and are too sick or injured to stand or walk on their own. Data from federally inspected slaughter facilities estimate 1.1-1.5% of U.S. dairy cows go down in a year, but this does not include those who collapse on-farm. A 2007 review of nonambulatory cattle suggests that the number of downed cattle on U.S. farms or feedlots or who are sent to slaughter in any given year may approach 500,000. It has been reported that dairy cows account for approximately 75% of downed cattle.
so to sum up, yes most cattle in the us spend most of their time outdoors (excluding transportation to the slaughterhouse and time spent in the slaughterhouse), though half of that is in feedlots where they cannot really move.
This will sound like a contrarian troll comment but I mean it quite sincerely
Why does the calculation for the net moral cost of beef vs chicken not factor in the utility gain/loss from each of those in your diet?
I can't speak for other people but I can say personally that I would be experiencing quite a bit of suffering personally if I could never eat beef again, but I would not be experiencing that level of suffering if I could never eat chicken again.
I am in general resistant to utilitarian reasoning like this, for reasons I have expounded on at length in your various comments sections throughout the years. By framing everything in terms of this, people (or, at least, rationalists) are put in a position where they feel that their own preferences are invalid unless they can be justified on utilitarian grounds. It's not that hard of a jump from there to "my preferences don't matter" or even "my preferences don't exist"
But they do exist! And they do matter! It is fundamentally meaningful to factor in the cost _in human suffering_ of dietary restrictions when you're running these numbers.
(Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions. I imagine most of your instinctive reactions to my position is some variant of "come on, don't be ridiculous, nobody cares that much about their diet". I think most people do, and it's us here who are unique in that we don't care as much)
You don't need to justify your personal preferences on utilitarian grounds. They're part of the total utility you're trying to optimize.
Utilitarianism as it is usually construed would not ask anybody to make a large sacrifice except for a proportionately large benefit (to themselves or others).
As long as you're okay to include the pleasure of killing you in the moral utility calculations of a serial killer, I'm fine with your reasoning.
>Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions.
Yeah yeah, we're all beautiful and unique snowflakes.
This seems a bit odd. Clearly the serial killer is already making these decisions presumably on the basis of this sort of calculation (if less explicitly), so it's already included from the operative point of view. I'm pretty certain though that however euphoric killing Tim would make the serial killer is not going to adjust the balance of any sensible utilitarian consideration of a serial killer's actions, but it should certainly be a factor that is entertained.
If this was meant as a throwaway knock-down of Tim's argument, it seems to fail on all fronts really: the logic can and probably is already applied, but you would need to attach very low utility to human life for it to be a valid objection.
Similarly, you would need to attach extremely high utility to a single human meal and extremely low utility to an animal life for it to be a noticeable modification to the basic utilitarian argument for veganism.
The utility of veganism isn't based on valuing the lives of livestock. It's based on either wanting livestock to not suffer (even if that means they don't exist), and/or attempting to optimise the planetary carrying capacity for humans (presumably as an adjunct to some form of birth rate promotion, as right at the moment we're not on track to reach even the people-eat-some-meat carrying capacity).
Personally, I assign the suffering of varelse a utility of zero. I wouldn't support crow, ape or orca farming, but I don't care about cows or chickens (or dogs or cats).
That's not really a valid comparison, because the relevant factor there is that the acquaintance would be demonstrating seriously sadistic tendencies. Whereas people who eat meat don't do it because they get a kick out of animal suffering.
Killing for amusement is very different from killing for some utility (preferred food in this case). As a completely unbothered meat eater, who has meat for 60+% of my meals, I am very bothered by purposeless injury or death to animals.
Not in the general case. There are a couple of obvious subcases where it would bother me: 1) if they were stealing other people's chickens/cats to torture, 2) if they were doing it where other people had to listen (including me, in this case; it's at the very least annoying).
You can try the thought experiments on me if you want, but in all honesty I doubt I'll accept those either.
I think a lot of people would be bothered by such a thing for social, not moral reasons. I personally would be worried about it being evidence of sociopathy/psychopathy than anything. As other commentators have mentioned, it's the *amusement* that's the primary issue.
If you mean "The serial killer includes their pleasure of killing you in their own utility calculation", that doesn't make sense. Obviously Tim would object to an agent pursuing a utility function sufficiently different from their own. That's like saying "As long as you're okay with a paperclip maximizer acting in accordance with the utility it assigns to making paperclips".
On the other hand, if you mean "As long as you're okay with including a serial killer's pleasure with the rest of your utility function", then certainly that would be the consistent utilitarian position. If the utility that the serial killer gets is greater than that lost by Tim (and others, as other people may experience distress as a result), then from a consequentialist utilitarian point of view, kill Tim is good. But utility is just another word for how good something is, so this is just saying "If killing Tim is an overall good thing, then killing Tim is good", which isn't much more than a tautology.
Of course you should consider your own happiness, but this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
Which is irrelevant because almost nobody is perfectly altruistic. Given that people are somewhat selfish, it is better for them to at least find the most beneficial / least harmful ways to be selfish.
Lots of people do because they weigh human suffering / pleasure at an enormously higher level than animal suffering / pleasure.
For instance, a QALY is typically £20,000 - £30,000 in the NICE calculations, which would value a life at something £1.6m - £1.8m (80 years) - or $2.27m - $2.55m. Let's say $2.5m to get a round number since we're only doing an estimate. Cows are valued at about £1500 a head, or about $2000 to keep our estimate consistent. That is, less than one thousandth the value of a human. There's no compensation schedule for negligently killing someone else's animal beyond the cash value (like any other property you destroy).
The market value is so low because most people don't care about animal suffering (other than pets). That value is the value of the flesh as food, not any sort of intrinsic value for the animal.
Caring about farm animal suffering puts you firmly into the societal minority. Now, not a very small minority (vegetarians and vegans are about 10% of the US population, and there are plenty of others who care but not enough to adopt that diet). But a minority nonetheless.
So yes, I think most people do believe that their pleasure in eating the food they like outweighs the suffering involved in factory farming.
After reflecting on this for some time I think most of us have an aesthetic preference against animal suffering rather than a moral one. I hate to _see_ an animal suffer, but on the other hand I'm not going to get off my butt to actually do anything about the trillions of animals currently suffering outside my line of sight.
In my city (and I think in many others) there's vegan groups who occasionally stand around on the street challenging people to watch abattoir videos. They seem to be under the misapprehension that since I'd be disgusted to see animals getting slaughtered that I'm morally opposed to it. But they're wrong; I also don't want to see a video consisting of close-ups of people's buttholes pooping, but that doesn't mean I think pooping is immoral or should be banned.
this discrepancy could well be due to animal mistreatment -- especially that entailed in animal production, because most humans would and have act decisively to stop wanton torture of animals -- being normalised in our societies for historical reasons, whereas mistreatment of humans is not.
>on the other hand I'm not going to get off my butt to actually do anything about the trillions of animals currently suffering outside my line of sight.
The vast majority of people have exactly the same attitude about the hundreds of millions of people currently suffering outside of their lines of sight. To me this implies that morality is essentially a subset of aesthetics, albeit one that you're supposed to profess strong opinions about, often even to yourself.
I fully agree with this and I've been convinced this is the case since my early teens and I'm now middle-aged. Morality refers to the subset of aesthetics you feel strongly enough about to desire for others to submit to it as well.
In consequentialist terms an animal killing another animal is at least as bad as a human killing an animal (because animals are killed quickly in factories, but often killed more slowly and painfully in the wild). So why do I never hear about any vegan who wants to round up all the lions and feed them soylent in a zoo where they can't terrorize other animals?
Scott previously linked to a group that was actively researching wild animal suffering. (I don't remember whether they had identified any interventions that they considered worthwhile or not, but they thought it was important to study.)
In fact, this has led to some significant debates between animal rights advocates and environmentalists. Sometimes pretty acrimonious ones.
I think the main points in the other direction are non-consequentialist views that suffering is worse or otherwise has a different status when it is caused by a moral agent, and practical or theoretical arguments that we don't or are unlikely to have the capacity to do much about predation in the foreseeable future, in some cases without causing other bad unintended consequences.
Some people, including me, feel that it's obvious that at least in a hypothetical future where humanity directly controls all of Earth's ecology, we should definitely suppress predation.
Are you saying that you (or people in general) would do something about it if it was a moral preference? I' not really sure about that. After all, people care about a lot of other things than their moral preferences.
>Of course you should consider your own happiness, but this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
Wait, what? Your model of "most people" is that most people think animal suffering outweighs their own happiness? I find that very implausible, considering that the vast majority of people eat meat and do not donate to effective animal charities. I'm only one person, but certainly I prioritize my own happiness over any possible number of suffering cows and chickens.
Do you think that people actually find this convincing as a moral argument, or just try to ignore it? Saying that people's behavior reveals that they don't actually care about animal welfare is like those economic arguments that smoker's behavior reveals that they don't actually care about cancer. It seems clear that people *do* care about these things, but this caring just doesn't manage to get a grip on their behavior, when confronted by something else they care about much less, but that is very immediate and therefore has a tight grip on their behavior.
Over 30% of Mechanical Turkers explicitly said cows were of zero moral value. 60th-percentile numbers (1000 cows = 1 human morally) are also consistent with eating cows (for reasonable QALY numbers), as 80 years of human life eating beef only requires 120 years of cow life (assuming cows are slaughtered at 3 years and a human eats 0.5 cows per year), and the 50th-percentile numbers (75x) aren't even that far off. There's also the questions of to what degree Mechanical Turk is a biased sample here - it's Internet-based - and of personal misestimation (some people would see low numbers here as representing a more enlightened mindset).
I think those numbers are consistent with eating cows only if you attribute 100% of human well-being to their cow-eating. If you take a very conservative over-estimate and assume that 10% of human well-being is due to eating cows, it looks like you wouldn't make it even at the 60th percentile, unless I've done my math wrong.
If you only need 120 years of cow life to have a lifetime of eating cow (and 0.5 cows eaten per person per year is high), then at 1000:1 you only need eating beef to add -1 * [factory farmed cow QALY] * 120 / 1000 QALY to a human beef eater.
If a perfectly healthy human is 1 human QALY per year, and a perfectly healthy cow raised c.1800 farming practices and slaughtered ethically is 1 cow QALY per year, the lowest a factory farmed cow would go is, say, -3 cow QALY per year.
-1*(-3)*120/1000 = 0.36 human QALY over 80 years, or 0.04 human QALY per year.
So eating beef is utility preference consistent if it improves your life by 4% for the most extreme reasonable assumption of factory farmed cow QALY, and note that many people would assign factory farmed cow QALY values closer to -1 (1.3% improvement consistent) or 0 (any improvement consistent).
For beef to be immoral, cows don't *just* need non-zero moral value. They need non-zero moral value AND to have negative QALY in factory farmed conditions, and even then the numbers matter.
Note that -3 is wild because it is asserting that a world with zero cows is better than a world with 74.9% cows raised in historical conditions + ethically slaughtered and 25.1% of cows factory farmed. I think some people who are suffering fixated think that's obviously true whereas that's crazy to me. I have a strong existence > non-existence bias, not to an unlimited degree but at the very least to the degree that factory farmed cow QALY is probably in the 0 to -1 range.
If cow happiness is worth 0.001x human happiness, factory-farmed cows are -1 QALY and enforced vegetarianism is 0.99 QALY (obviously for people who don't like meat this last one isn't true, but we're talking about the calculus for the people who do), then 80 years of enforced vegetarianism + 0 years of cow = 80*.99 + 0 = 79.2 total QALY, while 80 years of meat-eating + 120 years of farmed cow = 80*1 + 120*0.001*-1 = 79.88 total QALY.
(Indifference point for 1000x would be at cow life = -6.67 QALY and vegetarianism = 0.99 QALY, or at cow life = -1 QALY and vegetarianism = 0.9985 QALY; the former value for cows seems implausible and while the latter value for vegetarianism is certainly true for some people, there are definitely also people who like meat more than that.)
Personally, I don't like meat, so I'm not planning to eat it regardless of whether it's morally permissible.
But since you are appealing to what "most people believe", I feel I should speak out as an example of someone not convinced that factory farming is more morally important than human dietary preferences. I've got 2 major issues:
1. I haven't been convinced by any particular position on the topic of population ethics (i.e. how to do moral reasoning about actions that change the number of people who will be born in the future). The obvious options run into clear problems (e.g. "the repugnant conclusion"). Without a way to handle population ethics, you could still argue that certain *kinds* of farming are better or worse, but I don't see a convincing way to argue that just flat reducing (or increasing) the total *amount* of farming is good or bad.
2. I am not convinced that cows and chickens are moral patients. Most appeals for their welfare seem to rely on evoking emotional reactions that I personally don't feel very strongly. I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of arguing this--I don't know how I would argue that *humans* are moral patients to someone who didn't already believe it--but this is a key axiom of the animal welfare movement, and it just doesn't resonate with me.
re 2, an argument for why animals have moral standing could be that (1) things can be good or bad for them, (2) they experience things as good or bad through their senses, in their consciousness, and (3) they are self-maintaining.
but really everyone should decide why they think humans have moral standing, and then see if that applies to (some of) the other animals too. i think many people who suspect animals don't have moral standing haven't really thought about why they think humans have moral standing.
my argument is not actually my argument, it is christine korsgaard's argument (though i find it very convincing). i will try to explain how i understand it.
korsgaard develops her theory of value from aristotle. she makes the distinction between two kinds of good -- (1) something that is functionally good (bc it allows something to function well, e.g. a whetstone is good for a knife, thatch for a roof, food for humans) and (2) something that is good finally (the good life, the thing we find good for its own sake). she also argues that good is what she calls "tethered" -- that a thing is necessarily good _for another thing_. she then argues that the second sense of good is derived from that first sense, that the only reason anything is good at all is because there are creatures for whom things can be good, not the other way around.
to korsgaard, a core feature of living things is that they are self-maintaining -- that they take actions in the world to keep themselves well-functioning and reproducing. obvious examples include eating, drinking, sleeping, avoiding harm, procreating, etc. so in our acting to attain what is good-for us in the functional sense, we kind of take that thing to be good in the final sense, we elevate it in a way.
importantly, animals act based on information in the world (unlike the other animals, humans are aware of their reasons for acting, but that is not important in determining moral standing). what's more, in our representational system, this information appears to us in what she calls a "valenced" way, where perceptions motivate actions -- it is in this way that the functional and final goods appear to us.
i have not exactly tabooed the words here, but i hope that explains what is meant a little bit better.
I'm not sure that did much to clear up your moral patienthood position for me.
Are self-healing materials moral patients? (They react to their environment in a way that tends towards self-preservation.) How about black holes? (Ditto.) I expect your answer is "no", but I also don't see how your criteria can exclude them except by saying something like "they have no consciousness/cannot perceive things", but then I want to know what consciousness/perception is, and how you tell whether a thing has it.
2 is pretty easily argued. Cows and chickens both have nervous systems capable of registering fear and pain. Cows likely have much more sophisticated emotions than that, due to them being large mammals that rear their young. I can understand your difficulty with chickens, but cows are large, social mammals and if you can accept dogs as moral patients(which they plainly are)I can't see how cows would be a stretch.
I actually find it odd that so many people argue animals aren't conscious agents, almost as if they were rocks that somehow moved, made decisions, mated, etc. All mammals have all the hardware for fear and pain, so it would follow that they are having a subjective experience of such.
Maybe it's because I live in Japan, and have heard people proudly declare that they have whale steaks in their freezer for later, but I find it strange that people default to assuming emotive, intelligent animal behaviours have no subjective experience behind them. As if a singing whale is singing in the way that a mimosa pudica plant moves its leaves. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but that does appear to be many people's basic attitude(though in the west, not towards whales, obviously).
I think you are suggesting that moral patienthood is implied by some combination of: fear, pain, sophisticated emotions, sociality, consciousness, agency, and/or subjective experience. Could you make that inference a little more explicit?
Sure, and speaking of inferences those are an essential part of my argument. We regard other human beings as moral agents of equal standing because we infer, based on a reasonable amount of evidence, that they are having a subjective experience wherein fear, pain, etc are felt, and wherein torture or suffering also limits future experiences of joy, happiness, pleasure. We use a multitude of evidence to make this inference: we hear a cry of pain and recognize it as similar to our own when we are having a pain experience. We can also point to certain structures in the brain and show that they are responsible for producing emotion in ourselves, and other beings with those same structures.
Many animals provide quite a large amount of evidence by which we can make the same inference. A dog cried out when kicked. Its brain has structures similar to ours, which produce states of fear, happiness etc. Obviously, these states are much less sophisticated than our own, but in so far as emotions are concerned, (and I think probably self-awareness as well, though that is less important in this argument) it is a difference of degree. Stating that animals aren’t moral agents worthy of any ethical consideration is throwing the baby out with the bathwater because yes, of course, their internal experiences can’t match the complexity of our own. But the fact remains that most animals, especially the mammals we like to eat, are not just putting on a show of being afraid, or feeling pain, like some 19th-century automaton. It’s quite reasonable to infer that something similar, though simpler than human experience is going on.
Sandro’s comment reply to AdamB states the problem well. Intellectual superiority doesn’t render the internal experiences of simpler minds ethically unimportant. My understanding is that your argument is based on the assumption that animals are glorified mechanisms, but science doesn’t really bear that out. Sometimes it seems like the prior “animals don’t think” is so strong in most people that even videos of octopuses solving puzzles through trial and error, elephants trumpeting loudly over the bodies of fallen family members, chimps doing any number of very smart things, do nothing to change their attitudes towards the factory farming situation.
You are discussing the inference from (direct observations of animals) --> (therefore, genuine fear and pain).
I wanted you to discuss the inference from (fear, pain, etc.) --> (therefore, moral patienthood). Why are those the criteria? Some humans can't feel pain; does this reduce their moral patienthood?
And you definitely do NOT understand my argument, because I haven't even made one yet; I only stated that I'm unconvinced.
But to give a better idea where I'm coming from, my current model of this topic is that most people subconsciously assign moral patienthood using a rule very close to "do I feel sympathy for it?" Most attempts to get people to support animal welfare look to me like they're basically just attempts to evoke sympathy. ("Things can be good or bad for them", "they feel fear and pain", "don't these baby pictures make you feel warm fuzzies?", "doesn't this nasty video make your mirror neurons cringe?", waxing poetical about animal emotions, etc.)
One philosopher I was assigned to read in high school actually argued this *explicitly*. He said something along the lines of "humans can at least vaguely imagine what it's like to be a drowning gopher, but I don't think we can imagine what it's like to be a tree whose roots are rotting; therefore the drowning gopher is morally significant but the rotting roots are not."
I do not reflectively endorse this standard. I think in some cases it is too narrow: If we ever encounter truly alien aliens, we might not be able to feel sympathy for them, but I don't think that automatically means they're not moral patients. In other cases I think it is too broad: Humans can feel sympathy for stuffed animals and fictional characters!
So I do not intend to be moved by statements that *merely* paint animals in a sympathetic light.
So an interesting question then is: would you have the same objection if the cow were very carefully and painlessly put to death (and then eaten)? That is, the cow is led into a very pleasant slaughterhouse, spacious, clean, with whatever artwork is pleasing to cows on the wall of his chamber well-stocked with excellent grass. An hour later all the O2 in ths cow's chamber is replaced with N2, and the cow dies a peaceful and painless death, after which it is butchered.
I think that solves a lot of problems for me. If animals raised for meat lived good lives that ended relatively painlessly in one bad day I would have much less problem with it.
It begs the question of any conscious being's right to take life, but for me, it makes the situation much much much less objectionable. I guess to put it simply, I think human well-being is more important than animal well-being, but not so much so that we can justify giant animal torture factories that kill 3 billion a day. But probably by enough to justify the situation you've described above.
That's interesting, thanks. One more: does the calculus change if we're talking about putting criminals to death? That is, does a genuinely painless method of execution reduce your objections to (or increase your support for) capital punishment?
I'm just trying to figure out what the driving moral principle is. I get the feeling it isn't *just* suffering, so I'm trying to figure out what else is in there, if you see what I mean.
There are other guiding principles than the pleasure or suffering of those affected by your actions. For example, you could make a stewardship argument: "it's wrong to factory farm animals, even if they weren't capable of suffering, because it's ugly and wasteful and humans have a moral duty to use animals as a resource wisely and efficiently." You could make a reflective moral case: "it's wrong to factory farm animals, even if they don't suffer, because in order to do it human actors need to act in ways that are callous or ugly and they may themselves become callous and ugly thereby, i.e. their work experience bleeds over into their life -- someone who slaughters cows all day becomes X% more likely to beat his wife than someone who grows tulips."
Most people don't actually make those arguments in the 21st century, but they used to be made more often in the past.
Seems worth noting that those arguments both appear to imply market failures. If there's a more efficient way to do farming, the farmers should adopt it voluntarily without consumers needing to pressure them into it. If the work is harmful to the farmers, you should need to pay the farmers extra to make them do it anyway, causing those harms to already be reflected in the price of the product. (Unlike harms to the animals, which are economic externalities because farmers don't need to get the animals' consent.)
I don't find market failures particularly implausible, but it seems like a serious development of these arguments ought to include an explanation of where and how these particular markets have failed to correct those particular problems on their own.
I'd also want to see empirical numbers for the efficiency and the bleed-over, if possible.
I think we're talking about different things. You're saying "once the human beings have these values, the market will reward processes that are consistent with those values," and I agree with that as a matter of principle.
But an ethical argument is about *setting* those values. You're trying to persuade umpty consumers that they should care about things like stewardship or a coarsening of their moral fiber, and should therefore use their consuming power to influence producers via the usual market mechanisms.
You could take the position (common in economics) that ethical values and utility functions et cetera are just inputs, things we assume exist and are fixed, and then we see how the market functions with these inputs. But I suggest that is not the field of ethics, which is about how we choose and change those ethical values and utility functions in the first place.
> this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
I don't know, I think many people would have an intuitive picture where animal suffering has nonzero value but it's many orders of magnitude less important than the suffering of a "fully" intelligent animal.
I mean, in my case I don't eat meat for breakfast (though I eat dairy at every meal), but I do feel unsatisfied if I go to bed and haven't eaten meat for dinner. Fish doesn't count, as far as I've experienced.
It's not as bad as going to bed without eating dinner at all, but maybe... 30% as bad?
A couple of years ago myself and another SSC reader co-wrote an essay where we looked in absolutely exhaustive detail at every possible element that we could think of that could contribute to the moral calculus for a decision to eat meat or go vegetarian.
On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin, but that the question of what utility loss there was from abruptly switching from a meat to vegetarian diet was understudied.
We agreed that most vegetarians eventually stop caring that they can't eat meat (although noted that this could have been survivorship bias) so the impact on your lifetime utility of an abrupt switch was unlikely to outweigh other benefits accruing to you personally, such as slightly better health or slightly cheaper meals.
Speaking for myself now and not the output of the co-written essay, I reckon that could be why those calculations rarely appear in essays like the one spawning this comment section - nobody has studied it and the effects are actually pretty small compared to the impact of more significant elements of the moral calculus such as the one about how much / whether animals suffer and whether it greatly extends your life or whether that is a function of higher income / intelligence which is predictive of vegetarianism.
> On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin, but that the question of what utility loss there was from abruptly switching from a meat to vegetarian diet was understudied.
I'm not going to look at "the literature" to figure out how much I like eating beef, come on.
"On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin"
What does "at the margin" mean in this context?
"We agreed that most vegetarians eventually stop caring that they can't eat meat (although noted that this could have been survivorship bias)"
Oh apologies if that wasn't clear. We were referring to the study I link below where a group of US consumers in 2016 said they would pay around $15 a year to avoid a 1% decrease in their consumption of meat. If you were to multiply that by 100 to get a 100% decrease in meat consumption you end up at roughly $1500 a year which is very roughly what you save on groceries by going vegetarian so it nets out.
However we reasoned that you couldn't just multiply by 100 to get the WTP to avoid a 100% decrease, because there are some meat meals that people value far more than others (for example meat-containing airline meals are presumably ultra-low value, whereas culturally significant meat-containing meals such as thanksgiving turkey are presumably ultra-high value)
That's why I make such a performance about the 'margin' bit - the case for decreasing your meat consumption by a few percent (i.e. at the margin) seems very strong, because we can quantify what an average person is likely to think about that. The case for totally cutting meat out of your diet (i.e. not a marginal change) is harder to justify because the evidence on that sort of change is lacking, although just because it is harder to justify doesn't mean we can't say anything at all about it - it is just an uncertainty in our mental model.
The paper is slightly more complicated than I can summarise here (as it has been a while since I read it and I don't want to give you bad information), but the value approximately represents an elasticity of demand with respect to the price of meat at the margin. That is, the authors find the increase in the price of meat that would result in a 1% reduction in its consumption (holding the price of all other food constant) and then calculate the cash value that would have to be transferred to leave people no worse off than when they started once they'd reconfigured their consumption bundles, which is where they get the $15 from.
In the paper the authors motivate this by talking about a change in policy (such as might be put about by an imagined vegetarian government) but they clearly have a bit of an axe to grind - you should be able to derive exactly the same result just by considering a generalised price increase, such as might arise from a supply shock (like a hacking attack on a meat producer, for instance)
I don't think it's so much about differential quality of meals , as it is that cutting meat out entirely is entirely different from ordering a 12 oz. steak instead of a 16 oz. steak, or having waffles instead of a sausage biscuit for breakfast. For me personally, if I fast from meat for a meal, I don't even miss it. If I fast from it for a day, then by dinnertime I'm basically not enjoying food anymore and everything feels like an unsatisfying side dish while I'm left craving a main course.
Well, of course there's no loss of utility at the margins. If decreasing meat decreases utility, then presumably increasing consumption would increase utility, so they would keep increasing their consumption until the marginal utility is zero. That's how consumption works: if you assume rational behavior, for appropriate definition of "rational", everyone's marginal utility is, apart from discretization effects, zero for all gods they consume. People act to maximize their utility, and maxima are found where the derivative is zero. I quite possibly could be missing something, but this seems like a rather trivial claim.
I'm a huge fan of Impossible meat. I'm glad a large chain like BK offers it, but I've got to say their version is pretty different from others I've had and doesn't really do the product justice. I definitely still like it and order it, and maybe that's just what you get from fast food, but I think people will be a lot more impressed by the similarity to meat if they order it somewhere else or cook it themselves. Also the grocery store price has been coming down quick!
Every thread on meat-eating attracts a lot of people whose assumption is "Well of course everyone knows animal suffering matters more than human health, happiness, and convenience, so much so that we don't even need to note that these decisions impact human health, happiness, and convenience"—while the 90% of us who eat meat are like, what the hell are you on about?
Well Scott is a utilitarian and takes utilitarianism for granted, and I suppose utilitarianism in the 21st century has decided to go this Singerian direction of denying human uniqueness.
I'm not a utilitarian, I'm as convinced of its falseness and pointlessness as I'm convinced of anything in this world, but I don't really mind, it's his show, I still find the discussion somewhat interesting. Just as if a Christian blog was debating the merits of Calvinism vs. Arminianism, I don't see the point in atheists showing up and asking "What the hell are you on about?"
"(Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions."
Five sigmas is one in three million. The US has a population of ~330m, so that would be 110 Americans. I'm pretty sure that there are more than 110 American readers of ACT. Allowing different dimensions allows some more wriggle room, but not much, especially since you said that we are 5-sigma in several dimensions.
Quick vocab question: is sigma the universal term for standard deviation of all distributions, or does it specifically imply the normal distribution? I thought the former, and human thought variation is probably a fat-tailed distribution.
Your comment reminded me of one of the adversarial collaboration contest entries a few years ago. It has a spreadsheet where you can enter in all the different numbers (including personal benefit from meat eating) to calculate whether (according to your state of knowledge) eating meat is a net harm or not.
I've gone vegetarian in the last couple years, and indeed I have experienced a hit to my wellbeing because of it. I enjoy meat, and my meals have not been as delicious or as fulfilling since I've given it up. How much suffering is this? Not really that much. For example I'd have a very hard time taking seriously the idea that it's caused me as much suffering as even a small number of chickens' farm lives worth. At such a small price, it would not factor meaningfully into any of these kinds of calculations.
I am in the same position. For instance I do miss eggs, but the idea that I could get enough pleasure out of a single egg to outweigh 24 hours of suffering for a hen in a battery farm is crazy to me.
I'm not sure what needs to be written on a carton of eggs to make you comfortable, but in rural areas in the US there are farmstands where you can buy a box of eggs from chickens freely roaming around the barn near that farmstand, without any fences. I think they get locked up for the night and when the weather is very cold, but I can't imagine what kind of better life you might realistically want for them. Some of the owners of these farmstands might sell eggs at farmers markets.
If that looks good to you, maybe you don't have to skip eggs. Maybe you just have to figure out how to obtain that kind of eggs.
My parents have chickens in that exact environment. It's actually funny about going into the pen at night, because the chickens all go stand by the door when the sun starts going down and waiting to be let inside. For much of the day they wander around the yard pecking at the ground.
"By framing everything in terms of this, people (or, at least, rationalists) are put in a position where they feel that their own preferences are invalid unless they can be justified on utilitarian grounds."
But utility is *defined* by preferences. Being bummed out by a loss of food choice is perfectly valid negative utility. Just not very much, in comparison.
Serious question - How do you measure subjective preferences in this manner? "Not very much" seems to be based on your internal preferences, rather than an objective outside measure that could encompass a statistically meaningful sample of humanity.
Yes I'm extrapolating an estimate about the average person from my own internal experience.
Of course that's non-objective and likely off by a factor, but the statement I justify with it doesn't strike me as especially strong, either. Being a factory chicken seems, for all we can know about the experience, orders of magnitude worse than, say, being a human with moderate depression. Of course, no way to verify.
There are two subjective calculations going on here, which can result in a very very different conclusion. The first is the subjective enjoyment of the meat. The second is our estimation of how much the animals enjoy/hate different types of existences.
I honestly doubt that insects have enough understanding of their existence to even classify enjoyment/misery. Kill as many as you like, and they don't seem to really understand or care. They die in masses very quickly anyway. Chickens are clearly higher level than insects, but having raised them and been around them all my life, I have my doubts that they understand much either. In my personal estimation, the subjective concern about these animals suffering is very low. Like, not worth worrying about from a moral perspective. (Dolphins, whales, and elephants are likely quite different from even cows, and definitely different from chickens).
I would personally be quite unhappy with a no-meat diet, and likely less healthy as well.
My internal calculation likely looks very different from yours, but comes out to "Eat as many chickens as you like, and pigs and cows too." I *might* feel bad eating a dolphin, don't know because I've never been in that situation. I'd feel bad about eating an endangered species (other than for literal survival), but mostly because I and other humans value the diversity of species, maybe for only aesthetic reasons.
A lot of the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism seem to take it for granted that the individual making the argument is speaking from a central/normal/universal mindset, and therefore their arguments are correct. I'm questioning that assumption directly, because my subjective feelings are very different.
This seems like a great use case for having a functioning government. If there are really these kinds of moral and ecological costs to individual consumption choices, rather than push off the calculations and offsets of exactly what they are to individual consumers who are purchasing thousands of distinct items a year, reflect those costs directly in the price of goods via taxation that internalizes externalities like these.
Legislating morality is generally held to be a *bad* thing. There is a very solid argument to be made for incorporating the cost of environmental damage (although it should rightfully be taken at point of production rather than point of sale), but there is no analogous argument for uses taxes to incorporate the "moral cost." Fundamentally, we can either treat the chickens as deserving of legal protection - (and then don't imprison and slaughter them), or we can treat them as deserving partial protection (don't torture the poor things), or we can treat them as inanimate property. None of those spaces opens a clear legislative justification for, "well, you can torture that animal, but you have to pay Uncle Sam for the privilege." I'm not sure how one would even try to rationalize that choice.
That's fair and I think it also applies to considering moral cost individually. If you think your actions are causing widespread suffering to sentient creatures that deserve moral consideration, just stop doing those actions rather than seeking to offset the evil you're doing with good done elsewhere.
If it were the only option, everyone would complain for a while and then get used to paying slightly more for their humanely reared animal products. I can think of worse things than this.
Isn't many forms of welfare trying to solve a moral collective action problem?
In some cases you can make a practical argument for foreign aid or unemployment. But in Australia if you end up seriously disabled a lot of public money goes to ease your suffering. In a way that seems more to do with moral considerations.
Not necessarily. There are purely utilitarian arguments for things like disability insurance. It makes people more willing to undertake dangerous professions -- it used to be a big deal for coal miners' unions to negotiate good disability insurance. It prevents people from turning to socially costly activities (e.g. theft and fraud) if they have a problem earning a living honestly because of a disability. Plenty of people have argued for welfare with the second argument, in fact -- basically this is the point of view of people who say "school is cheaper than prison" (so e.g. we should subsidize education even for people who can't otherwise afford it, a version of welfare).
I know that "legislating morality" is a phrase that is used as though it's supposed to be a bad thing. But I really don't understand what it means. Isn't the *basic function* of government to "legislate morality"? Why do we bother with laws about property and murder if it's not to "legislate morality"?
I think it's clear that legislating something that one person claims to be morality while others strongly contest this is usually taken to be a bad thing, and then we forget that the things we morally agree on are still morality.
That's well put, although I think most people use the phrase "legislating morality" when they contemplate government legislating on things where any alleged perpetrator and any alleged victim are one and the same, e.g. legislating on gay marriage or smoking dope in your own house.
That seems to suggest that when people talk about "legislating morality", they very specifically *aren't* talking about utilitarian morality, but are only talking about theories of morality that *aren't* utilitarian.
Yes, that is correct, and I think reflects the way the phrase is most often used in the wide world. When people are talking about law and public order, I think they generally distinguish between actions that are "wrong" because they hurt other people and actions that are merely "not my style" because they only hurt yourself (and perhaps only hurt you morally or psychologically). It's often only the former that they consider within the ambit of the law, the latter are up to you, your conscience, and your God. (Although that is not universally true, there are plenty of people who consider actions that only hurt yourself to be within the reach of the law, because they consider government to have at least a slight loco parentis function -- it can legitimately act to improve the general public character, that is, people can say "What kind of moral character do we want to encourage?" and *compulsion* can have a role as well as persuasion or example.)
*Why* they use the word "morality" to refer to the actions that affect only your own utility I am not sure, except that perhaps they assume a stronger word would be used ("crime") if we were considering actions that harmed the public weal as well as the actor's. That is, "morality" is about how good or bad you feel about yourself, while "right/wrong/crime" are used to indicate measureable harm to others.
An interesting comparison can be made to the legal concepts of "crime" and "tort", where a tort is an offense against just one other person (who can sue you for damages) while a crime is an offense against the public as a whole (and which is prosecuted by the state in their name). Presumably people have a third category, which is an offense against just yourself, and it's this that they mean when they speak of mere "legislating morality."
Sorry, I forgot to add that, yes, I agree this cannot be all reduced to utilitarian calculus, where the subject/object distinction kind of fades away and we just tot up the total amount of harm without considering *from* whom it comes and *on* whom it lands. But I think most people are not utilitiarians in this way. They do assess the "what" but they also consider "who" and "to whom" in evaluating who is doing what to whom.
A similar effect can be seen in the concept of karmic justice, meaning people frequently assume that certain harms are less evil if the person to whom they happen "deserves" harm in some vague way -- is not a nice person, say, or is too lucky/privileged. Or they are more evil if the person to whom they happen is less "deserving" in some way -- is very nice, is young/cute/noble/has an inspiring life story. All of these are well outside the normal scope of pure utilitarianism, so far as I can see, but are an important part of how most people make ethical judgments.
Sincere question: what else should one base their legislation on? It seems to me that some form of morality will be at the bottom of whatever you try to legislate, but I'm happy to hear counterexamples.
No-fault divorce and a rebuttable presumption to shared legal custody of children, and a 50/50 division of assets, are probably examples of where people decided trying to have government settle the moral right-and-wrong questions in a divorce was either wrong a priori or practically too difficult.
The law that allows easements to be created by adverse possession is another case of practicality trumping moral righteousness, perhaps, as is the existence of the compulsory license in copyright law.
Well, OK, I can see that for no-fault divorce, although I think in practice it actually comes from a feeling that the law cannot make the desirable moral judgments correctly. In practical fact almost no divorcing couple wants government to butt out of their business, what each partner *wants* is for the law (or by extension society) to reinforce their own moral judgment on the other party. That's why divorcing couples can indulge in absurdly self-destructive (if only financially) struggles to have the law "punish" the other party. So I think no-fault came about more because people despaired of getting the law to punish the right party 100% of the time -- that is, it was practical, not moral, motive. But I agree *some* people supported it because their moral judgment was "butt out, this is a mostly private affair." But even then, you are extending "the basis of legislation" from the Legislature to the hearts of voters, which is a bit of a stretch.
With the easements and compulsory licenses, I'm entirely failing to see how these can be rooted in a moral "butt out" attitude.
I agree with most responders that, in some sense, the point of law is exactly to "legislate morality", and that's what our laws actually do. I think the term "legislating morality" in its normal usage is actually a denunciation of legislating *my or your* morality over others. We want to legislate a morality arrived at collectively through some reasonable process. This brings us back to the OP: Is the problem really a non-functional government, or is the problem that we have a populace that would not vote for this proposal?
I would frame it more along the lines of "the point of law is to supplant morality", i.e. set up a framework of rules that are to be abided by regardless of their moral valence. I see deontology mostly as an attempt to sidestep morality in precisely this way so as to be suitable for any organised society with a high enough population or a high enough level of complexity. If we could trust people to use their moral sense to behave well (by whatever standard you might chose) and to align enough to avoid conflict we would need no law.
It sounds to me like you're talking about law and deontology as ways to reduce the individual complexity/effort of aligning behavior, whereas I'm talking about law as the mechanism for *enforcing* the alignment of behavior.
These are two, separate aspects of law, so I think your point is more discussing a separate aspect of law rather than reframing it, per se.
I bring that up because it means your point about law supplanting morality may be true, in terms of taking the burden of moral calculus off of individual citizens, but it doesn't contradict the idea that law is *enforcing* a morality. Law gives us guidelines for how to behave, so those guidelines are predicated on some conception of how we *ought* to behave, and if you call that conception a "morality", then we have law enforcing morality.
Tl;dr: While your point may be correct, I don't think it negates the idea that law is legislation of morality.
On a separate issue: You have a cool point about deontology as some kind of decentralized replacement for law. That sounds pretty plausible to me.
I agree with your distinction here. My comment wasn't meant as a direct refutation of the original claim, I mostly wanted to reframe it so as to underline my point of law (partly) having the function of supplanting private morality.
It's entirely true that drafting a law ultimately must be done based on moral considerations but once the law is in effect we can only hope it abides by any reasonable moral principles since we have to follow it either way.
Yes, my reading of the categorical imperative can probably fairly be summarised as "a decentralised or distributed replacement for, or sense of, law". It seems to me that Kant's whole project (and one of the key points of that whole German philosophical tradition) was to merge or equate "morality" and "law".
Have you accounted in your suggestion for the public choice constraints the government faces? The individual bureaucrats and politicians running the government Consumption Choices Board (or whatever) doesn't know people's individual preferences (which should be an input to your individual decisions), doesn't have an advantage over individuals in terms of knowledge to the extent of providing just the "right" size of externality off-setting witness the history of the federal food pyramid, the closest thing the Feds have done for something like this), and is much more likely to be cutting deals with concentrated industry interests (who will of course supply the justifications) over how much to tax various goods than they are to create some sort of idealistic scientific-based inquiry. That'll just be the veneer.
I agree having a perfect government that solves all problems correctly would relieve us of the necessity of worrying about problems on our own. Right now the actual government's main intervention in this space is subsidizing factory farming, so we're out of luck.
Your calculus is different I think, too. You're a public figure. You're not only directly compensated for doing this kind of research and analysis when you publish it on Substack, but you have the platform to influence behavior well beyond your own and make much more of a meaningful impact than a consumer who only makes choices for themselves. That makes the cutoff point at which the cost of engaging in this kind of exercise is no longer worth it much higher for you.
Well, it would be a good case for having a functioning government as long as "functioning" met your exact definition -- that is, as long as it taxes the phenomena you see as externalities. But what if it decides that your not going to church every Sunday is a massive externality, because the lack of prayer is what is causing hurricanes, epidemics, and the decline in work ethic among the young -- so you will need to be paying hefty taxes if you choose not to go? Or what if it decides that miscegenation is a terrible externality, because mixed race children are deeply unhappy, and so it decides to penalize mixed-race marriages with steep taxes? But it does those things very efficiently and effectively, so according to some people it is "functioning" very well indeed.
It's the risk we take having a government. It can do things we don't like. I specified government because it is the only actor out there with the power to unilaterally raise prices of arbitrary goods, but in the general case where individuals are overwhelmed with choice paralysis and want to offload option evaluation to a trusted third party, there are other options. This is effectively the purpose served by Give Well, Consumer Reports, Rotten Tomatoes.
An organization that can make recommendations but cannot raise prices won't be able to shape behavior as effectively as a government, but it may be a better option if the government can't or won't do anything or we just don't trust it enough.
No, government can do things *you* don't like, but by definition it does not do things *we* -- in the sense of a majority of eligible voters -- don't like. What I'm pointing out is that it's always wise to consider how often you will be in the majority, and how much fun it will be to be in the minority if you have (at some previous point) endorsed the proposition that what 50% of the voters + 1 can make you do anything they want.
Precision isn't accuracy. The numbers cited for ghg are laughably inaccurate, though stated with precision. This is why economists are always so wildly mistaken. They take numbers someone pulled out of their butt and run them through a formula that is utterly unrepresentative of the system.
This is an argument against Australian wheat specifically, but more generally there are clearly harms to animals from row-crop agriculture....as a vegetarian I don't quite know how to feel about this. (if you are an omnivore using this as a whataboutist argument, I hope you are already avoiding farmed meat other than grass-fed beef!)
I don't think this article is a compelling argument against vegetarianism at all. It contains a kernel of important truth - basically everything we do has costs, especially to the natural world, and extra-especially to its most delicate elements, and we should all be conscious of them - but to extend that into saying "well everything is at least sort of bad, so just do whatever you want" is prima facie absurd.
I haven't checked the numbers, but i vaguely remember that the amount of grains consumed by the cow before it became beef per calorie of beef is greater that the amount of grains per calorie when consumed directly by human. If so, then mouse plague consideration is an argument for vegetarianism, not against it.
100% this is not an argument in favor of animal agriculture as currently practiced! But if we are already talking about indirect and uncertain effects like climate change, I don't see how you can wave away other indirect and uncertain effects like mass mouse death. And maybe that changes the conversation from beef vs chicken to, like, row crops vs tree crops.
"the amount of grains consumed by the cow before it became beef per calorie of beef is greater that the amount of grains per calorie when consumed directly by human" That seems obviously true on thermodynamic grounds.
It's a little more complex than "obviously", given that at least some calories cows get are from pastureland that doesn't have grain agriculture. But I think that for anything other than full free-range grass-fed cows, it is obvious.
Switching away from meat apparently *reduces* crop requirements, as so many animals are inefficiently fed so much human-edible food: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "Less than half – only 48% – of the world’s cereals are eaten by humans. 41% is used for animal feed, and 11% for biofuels."
At our current margin that's very true. But at the same time there's a lot of land that's suitable for grazing but not for growing crops due to lack of water. Also we can feed blemished food to pigs. From that perspective the ideal amount of animals raised isn't zero, though it's far lower than current levels.
That doesn't seem like an argument for or against either veggie or omni... I simply can't imagine a world in which mass monocrop grain production would cease. It's more or less mandatory to sustain the current global population. Even a very large movement toward vegetarianism - say tripling in the US from 5% to 15% - would only result in a marginal decrease in monocrop production of wheat/corn/etc.
There are tree crops with higher calorie per acre yields and fewer inputs than cereal grains and even legumes -- I agree that decreasing monocrop cereal and legume production significantly seems unlikely, but if doing so had 10x the animal-welfare benefits of quitting chicken, it seems like something that would be relevant to the discussion.
For instance, mature chestnut stands can approach the calories per acre of corn, and chestnut finished pork is a delicacy. It's plausible that if you live in Australia and value avoiding mouse death at some nonzero level, switching your chicken consumption to chestnut-finished pork is better overall than replacing with a more grain-heavy diet.
Again -- not an argument in favor of animal ag as currently practiced, I myself am a vegetarian, but to me the whole rest of the agricultural supply chain deserves more scrutiny, not just the bit where you kill and eat a farm animal.
Growing a whole lot of (i.e.) chestnut, jackfruit, and cassava seems like a sensible thing to replace some portion of monocrop grains, but expecting people to voluntarily replace bread and masa seems *very* optimistic. We can see in modernizing countries today that as incomes rise, people switch from crops like yams or taro to more wheat and corn, and also eat more beef.
As a side note, mass rodent and bird death is also a normal part of grain production in the US. Estimates vary and it's not "mouse plague" level but it's probably millions/yr.
I think all of this makes a lot more sense if you add in "and of course, you're already spending some amount of money to do good in the world, however large or small that amount may be".
Assuming you're being efficient with that money, it kind of obviates the Yog-Sothoth problem. You have already chosen to donate/spend/forgo a certain amount of money, and that implies a certain price at which you're willing to purchase goodness for the world.
Decisions like whether to eat chicken will be priced appropriately; since you're already donating to the Stop Yog-Sothoth Fund, you are indifferent about whether to donate a marginal dollar, so if eating chicken is really worth a dollar to you, it must also be worth destroying a galaxy. Because that's your BATNA! That's what you would've done with that dollar otherwise (approximately).
In other words, the Yog-Sothoth thing is only confusing because it posits a world where you can save a galaxy for a dollar, care a lot about galaxies, don't care a lot about dollars, and are still somehow not already donating more.
I sort of get what you're saying, but I don't think it interacts very well with actual human reasoning. Cf. Peter Singer's example of the person who would ruin a $100 coat to save a drowning child, but isn't currently sending all of his money to child-saving charities.
I think this might prove that you should donate X% of your money to the most effective charity you know about, and then not care about ethics at all in any other facet of your life. Which I can't prove is wrong! But which seems unrealistic.
I think this is a bit too strong: at most it says that you should take ethical action yourself when it's easier for you to do so than to pay someone else to, and then donate X% of your money to effective charity as your contribution to society. This seems pretty reasonable, and is essentially how I've read you on effective altruism. You should still probably call your grandma, not shoot fireworks at your neighbors houses, not torture animals etc., those are expensive and impractical offsets.
It's certainly reasonable to think that people would be more likely to forgo $1 of pleasure to avoid summoning Yog than to pay $1 to unsummon Yog, but I think the Singer example is deliberately exaggerated (deliberately by him, not by you). Watching a child drown is horrifying and traumatic in a way that not paying attention to children dying far away is not. I'm not sure that there's such a large difference in action vs inaction in contexts where the consequences of actions are easy to ignore: the number of people avoiding palm oil/Xinjiang cotton etc. doesn't seem dramatically larger than the number of people giving money to environmental or human rights charity organizations. At least, not by the same margin as hypothetical child savers vs effective altruists.
Also, if there's such a big active vs passive distinction here, isn't this an arbitrage opportunity? Shouldn't someone start selling Yog-free chickens for $1.50 extra and make a ton of money?
You get counter-intuitive conclusions when you cluster supererogatory and obligatory actions together. If eating animals is morally similar to murder, then this sort of utilitarian offsetting is morally puzzling. Can I commit a murder and then donate to prevent murders? Commit an assault and donate enough to offset it? What if I donate enough to save 10 lives through effective charities, can I then murder someone and be considered a morally good person? It seems like morality does not work that way.
Well strictly speaking utilitarians say that it is not OK to save 10 lives and then murder one person because this sequence of actions is morally inferior to the sequence of actions where you save 10 people and then don't murder the extra one (unless of course you are in the situation where you can only save 10 people by murdering the extra one, in which case it is clearly OK to murder one person in order to save 10).
The weirdness comes into utilitarianism due to the better known problem of it being unreasonably demanding of its adherents. If utilitarians who cared about animal welfare really followed utilitarianism to the extreme and they thought that a chicken life was worth more than $6, they would donate all of their available money to effective animal charities and also not eat any meat. The weirdness comes in when very few people are actually willing to spend all of their disposable income on charity and instead spend some of it on themselves. You then end up with weird situations where they can make deals with themselves whereby they can donate more to charity in exchange for doing something morally dubious but have a situation whereby the outcome is better by both their personal standards and the world's standards. This clearly isn't the optimal set of moral actions, but it is perhaps better than what they would have done otherwise.
The relevant comparison that I lay out in my post is (do nothing) < (kill 1, save 2). This seems crazy though. Your preference ordering (save 10, kill 1) < (save 10) makes sense.
I don't think it's crazy (though coupling those actions unnecessarily would be), and you would have to be very very careful that you weren't ignoring other effects.
But how is this any different from the standard trolley problem? You either do nothing, causing 2 people to die due to inaction or you switch the tracks causing one person to die through your actions.
It seems crazy because if you knew someone personally who donated $6000 to a good well charity and killed their ex-wife, you wouldn't consider them morally superior to the average person.
I don't see it as analogous to the trolley. I'm clustering two actions and ranking it compared to doing nothing. So it's not murder v. letting day. It's murder + saving v. doing nothing.
The point is that by pure utilitarian standards neither the person who donated $6000 and killed their ex-wife nor the average person is very good. Both of them are letting a lot of people who they could have saved die. Things only become unintiutive when you allow for people not donating nearly enough to charity as they ought to.
Saving someone is the same thing as not letting someone die. You could equally well describe the trolley problem as do nothing vs. pull the lever, saving two people but killing one.
That is not the point that I'm trying to make. I'm making the argument that from a utilitarian perspective, the murderer is better and that is very counter intuitive. I think that is an error.
Utilitarianism further has a problem where letting die is equivalent to murder and that is counter intuitive as well. I think that is incorrect. The trolley problem constructs a scenario that makes killing and letting die as similar as possible. Would you condemn the action of killing a child as morally equal to not donating about $3200 to an effective charity? No of course not. So it seems like an error in the theory to me.
You mentioned earlier the problem of moral obligation that is really strong but never adhered to. I think that is counter-intuition as well.
The utilitarian will agree with the intuitive judgment if you're in the real world, because in the real world, the kind of person that kills their ex-wife tends to do lots of other directly brutal things, and either donating to charity or not doesn't usually correlate very strongly with other behaviors that make lives better or worse. It's only in the very tight confines of a thought experiment where you've stipulated that the people are in fact otherwise identical that the utilitarian will judge the one person better than the other, and this is no longer counterintuitive, because we have no intuitions about extremely weird cases like that.
Intuitively, the person who donated $6000 and killed their ex-wife seems worse, but why would we give that intuition any weight once we've examined the situation? If the donation indeed saved more lives than they took, would it have been better if they had done neither? I don't think so - it's better to save more lives in net.
Though the magnitude of the real-life benefit of donations is more uncertain, and they don't viscerally feel like they're doing a lot of good. So even large donations to effective charities might not feel on par with something like pulling some kids out of a burning building.
So let's compare it to that. You know someone who ran into a burning building with their ex-wife, pulled two children out from under a collapsed beam, pushed the ex-wife into the smoke to her death, and ran out carrying the kids. Assuming the kids would've died otherwise, is this better than if he had stayed outside? I think it is.
The more common thought experiment for what you're describing is the surgeon who kills a single patient and harvests all the organs to save nine others, or some number larger than one.
Typically, nobody says this would be okay, but why on strictly utilitarian grounds? Assuming the practice is widely known to occur, it could have a chilling effect where nobody ever voluntarily seeks medical treatment, but to one surgeon making the decision in private, reasonably certain no one will ever find out, it's hard to see why they shouldn't be killing patients and harvesting their organs.
Your example is obvious, the murder is wrong because you can do both - not-murder and donate to save lives. Neither precludes the other.
But in the animal welfare example, at least as considered above, the actions do preclude each other. Though they do so because they're framed that way, "if we're going to eat one meat or the other, which should we eat?".
The obvious resolution is less of both, less chicken and less beef. But staying within the framework above of one or other and not less in sum, the utilitarian calculus seems appropriate.
I don't understand the justification for the distinction between morality and axiology. Can you provide an explanation how these would differ under utilitarian thinking?
Utils are weighed. You come first, then your family, then your friends, then your community, city, province, country, civilization, species, class, and kingdom. So utils for you and your friends are worth waaay more than utils for cows or dolphins, which are worth more than chickens, which are worth more than invertebrates.
It's totally arbitrary, and everyone stands on their own moral perspective. The point is to build a society, and use that to define morality. Function and economics should take the lead.
I don't understand why I should take the concept of superrationality seriously. To me, it seems based on an obvious category error. As per the wikipedia article linked in the post:
"The idea of superrationality is that two logical thinkers analyzing the same problem will think of the same correct answer."
The category error is in the statement that a game like the prisoner's dilemma has a correct answer and has wrong answers.
Perhaps I am leaning too much on the "correct/incorrect" wording used on the Wikipedia article, though.
Don't get caught up on "correct/incorrect". That isn't the key. "Superrationality" is about excluding a set of possible answers, where you are more intelligent and rational than the other players. You can imagine a "solution" to the Prisoner's Dilemma, where you always defect, but your opponent is naive and stupid, and always cooperates. That's a great solution for you! But it assumes your intellectual superiority over the other player.
Superrationality prohibits those "solutions". Instead, your opponent in the game must be expected to be just as intellectually capable as you are. Which means that, for whatever reason you decide to chose some action in some game circumstance, they would also decide to choose the same action for the same reasons. So it is searching for an equilibrium solution, where all players run the *same* strategy (for the same reasons).
That implies eating chickens provides negative moral weight, not zero. So by eating chickens, you can actually offset eating some amount of beef! So what chicken:cow ratio do I have to eat to get at zero?
Unless I'm missing something, wouldn't you want to consider the price difference between beef and chicken? I'm sure it depends where you live, but generally I expect to pay something around 20% more for beef than chicken at a restaurant, and more than that at the grocery store. Without calculating, I expect the savings from purchasing chicken will be significant and likely enough to offset the more expensive moral cost of chicken (assuming you use the savings for that purpose).
I was thinking the same thing, but I think you could argue that the price difference corresponds to a difference in satisfaction, and that if one were to switch to the less satisfying option, one should offset that by spending even more on some other satisfying form of consumption, so in the end one would be paying more for the same amount of utility.
Yeah, but we were working with 250,000 calories of meat per year, so I figure we would be working with the base assumption that the meats are otherwise equal to the buyer, however price is a definite and significant difference (other comments have pointed out that this misses possible pleasure / heath benefits of beef vs. chicken, but these factors do vary among individuals).
I suppose the point is to help guide one's meat choice decision on an ethical basis, beyond factors that are already being considered like price/health/taste.
I agree we should probably assume that they are equal. I think the form of that assumption should be that the price differential is exactly cancelled out by a satisfaction differential, so that we can ignore both price and satisfaction in the ethical calculation. I think this assumption makes sense for small changes to one's diet (say switching from 55% beef to 45% beef) but is questionable for larger changes, where decreasing marginal utility would kick in.
I think that assumption works well if those are your preferences! :)
My concern would be that if someone finds chicken and beef roughly equal in taste (I fall in this category) and is willing to spend the same amount on each, the conclusion is that we should eat chicken over beef for moral reasons. This is the opposite of Scott's conclusion, and the change in the assumption is relatively minor.
Vegetarian sources of protein are generally cheaper. But, if you value the unique satisfaction and deliciousness of meat too much to give it up completely, the market is powerfully pushing you towards chicken or pork rather than beef or fake beef.
I think the assumption that causing a chicken/cow to be killed is worse than causing that chicken/cow to never come into existence in the first place needs to be examined. If the opposite were found to be true, we might instead conclude that we need to eat as many chickens as possible in order to maximize the number of chicken lives lived.
Clearly, eating a child is not morally equivalent to not having a child. There exist an extremely rare group of people that would say yes but Bullseye is appealing to the general intuition.
I really don't think there are many people that would say that, even in the groups you mentioned. The average Mormon apparently has <4 kids, which is higher than the US average but well below the maximum possible number of children. I assume they'd be more appalled by someone eating one of their children than by someone not having children.
What *answer you get* depends on who you ask. But that doesn't mean what is *worse* depends on who you ask. I find your answer rather misleading and unconstructive.
"Worse" is a value judgement and it is dependent on who you ask. If you ask an orthodox follower of certain aspects of the Kevod Hatzibbur than it's actually worse than eating your child as "a man and woman, an infertile man and woman, are like a page ripped from the torah" (BT Megil, iah24b)
Some mormon fundamentalist sects consider ANY waste of sperm to be an abortion (including wet-dreams) and any oral sex is prohibited because your wife could literally be eating your kids.
So no, I disagree with your assessment. Some people you might ask may think not having kids, and in myriads of forms of not having kids, is like tossing the torah in the fire or eating millions of unborn babies.
If people did in fact consider non-procreation worse than murder, we would expect people to argue for the death penalty for non-procreation, like people do for murder. I'm under the impression that this does not happen very frequently.
Where is this quote from "a man and woman, an infertile man and woman, are like a page ripped from the torah"? I see nothing like this in BT Megillah 24b
> "Worse" is a value judgement and it is dependent on who you ask.
I think the idea that all value judgments are subjective is pretty controversial. Most philosophers of ethics are in fact moral realists, for instance.
Where did you get that quote? Nothing remotely like it appears on Megilla 24b. But I can say that it is obvious to any orthodox Jew that being mevateil a lav, nullifying a positive commandant (such as having children), is nothing compared to a yehareg v'al yaavor, a commandment that you must die rather than violate, such as murder, whatever hyperbolic statements you can find about the importance of having children aside.
well, you would have to be able to somehow ask yourself that same question but having grown up and spent all of your (unnaturally brief) life in a factory farm, perhaps (if you are a chicken) never having seen the sun.
Yes, that is indeed the question. Would a chicken, if he could speak German, say that he has a lebensunwertes Leben? Would a chicken choose euthanasia/suicide given the opportunity?
to make this claim fairly would require some type of rawlsian "veil of ignorance". because you already exist, you'll naturally have a predilection towards existence. you would have to show an unbiased "possible you" prior to existence what existence would look like and let that "possible you" compare that state of existence to a state of non-existence.
i'm not definitely asserting that "possible you" would have a different answer, but it's also quite impossible to assert from your present position an unbiased set of intuitions.
I think the idea of making decisions without existing is absurd, even as a thought experiment. Cogito; ergo sum. So I think that, instead, we should look at revealed preference, which shows suicide to be rare, even under harsh conditions.
If that were the case, eating chicken wouldn't become the best option, because instead we could pay for a farm to raise lots of chickens in a way where they don't suffer.
I'm going to need to see conclusive and hard evidence of that and even more important a very good and specific while simultaneously broad definition for your concept of "suffering".
That may be the case, but when choosing between eating a cow and eating 160 chickens, we might conclude that we should choose the latter in order to give those 160 chickens a shot at life.
Generally these arguments aren't about the killing of the animal, but the raising of them. According to the reasoning, buying meat is wrong principally because you cause a farm to raise another animal in conditions of suffering. So it's actually an assumption of the argument that a life sufficiently full of suffering is immoral to bring into existence. To carry out your argument, I think you'd need to undermine that premise and convince people that the existence of creatures is good in and of itself, independent of suffering.
I don't see any reason that the burden of proof should be on the side questioning the assumption that chicken lives and cow lives are not worth living.
Sorry I didn't mean the burden of proof is on you, I'm just saying that that's where the argument is. It's not killing vs not-living; it's life-of-suffering vs not-living.
Right, I don't know if there's a good answer. Each side takes their stance as something like an axiom, so it's hard to see how to come at it via argumentation.
If we are doing a utilitarian calculus and incorporating animal suffering and death, then it is not clear to me that hastening the demise of human life is not a net increase in utility. Currently, around 3 billion animals are killed daily and billions more live in inhumane conditions. So in 3 days, there have been more animals killed than humans alive. If climate change accelerated the death of all humans, then couldn't this plausibly be a utility increasing good thing if it ended factory farming?
I do not believe in utilitarianism and I am not vegan but I am sympathetic to these arguments. However, when you put them together, it seems like it is better to kill all human beings alive. Can someone explain to me the error in my reasoning if it exists?
I'm a utilitarian and very very vegan-sympathetic, so I think I'm qualified to answer your question.
I think a big factor here is the future potential to be a net-positive society. That is to say, even if we're in the red today, our best option is to try and work toward a world where that's no longer the case.
This isn't *necessarily* wishful thinking. If humanity doesn't totally wipe itself out at any point, and advances in technology allow us to expand our total population, the future could contain ~some very high number of humans and other sentient beings who experience much more positive utility and much less negative utility than we do. If that's true, then it's "worth" enduring all the negative stuff now to try and achieve that future.
(Sidenote: If you really want to kill all humans, accelerating climate change is not a great way to go about it. That probably just causes resource scarcity, international, tension, and wars, which usually don't kill *all* humans. Killing *all* humans is really hard, which might be one reason utilitarians don't try to go for it.)
Very interesting. I respect this response a lot because it provides a true solution and not just a work around. How good is the solution? I would have to think a lot about it because this possibility is far from certain.
There's a lot of anthropologists and others who argue that most of human history was far worse for most people than pre-agricultural pre-history. However, many of these people still think that human life in the past century or two is far better than pre-agricultural life, so that the net result of agriculture has been positive, even though it was net negative for many centuries (and millennia).
The hope is that even if we are still in fact net negative when we consider factory farming, we might still get net positive. I think this all requires much more empirical investigation.
i'm partial to this argument and i've heard it stated in various ways before.
however, are we really depriving future individuals who haven't existed of a good existence? they aren't ever going to be present to lament the opportunity cost of being denied a good existence. meanwhile, there are presently countless individuals suffering violently. to cease existence for all would end that while not imposing any real threat to the Not Yet Born.
i'm of course not an advocate for the genocide of our planet, i'm just trying to take the above argument at its best and see where that leads us.
I admit that questions about the "rights" of nonexistent entities can be strange and counterintuitive.
I'd say the issue with the extinction route is *not* that it deprives particular hypothetical future people of their existence and "causes them suffering" in some weird counterfactual sense. The problem is that it results in a universe with no people in it (a "net zero" on the utility scale), as opposed to a universe where ~trillions of people get to lead net positive lives (a very high positive on the utility scale). The problem isn't the lament over nonexistence - it's the nonexistence itself.
So I would support humanity "sticking it out" for the same reason I support anything else with a delayed payoff.
I don't think there is an error in this reasoning. It's at least one reason people are concerned about future AI causing human extinction. More typically in the circles of people surrounding Scott, the concern is they'll be programmed with a naive objective function that optimizes for something amoral that inadvertently leads to human extinction. But it's also possible they're programmed perfectly and their objective function tells them the world will be better off without humans and that will be correct.
The objection from a human is just hey, I'm human, and I don't care about the non-human world being better off. The good of my own species is infinitely more important than the good of all other conceivable sentient beings, not for any rational or utilitarian reason, but just because.
Utils need to be biased to make sense. There's no point making everyone else happy if you get screwed over. It's not a human morality. You, your family, your country, and your species get first claim on utils.
It's the trolley problem. Your brother on one side, two randos on another. The good human will save his brother and kill five randos. This is morally acceptable.
The person who refuses to save his brother is a heartless jerk.
Assuming that the choice is "factory-farmed chicken" or "some kind of beef, I dunno, normal beef I guess" weakens this argument, although it also helps keep it simple. The 30-days-of-horror life lived by a factory chicken is indeed so horrible that I (an omnivore) will go out of my way to avoid contributing to it. The life lived by the fancy free-range bug-foraging high-welfare heritage chickens sold by my local butcher is… I mean, I don't know all the details, but as far as chicken needs go I think it's pretty ok up until the final butchering scene.
So with that calculus in mind, you can reduce carbon emissions AND reduce suffering AND get to eat a much nicer grade of chicken. (You can do 2 of the 3 by buying fancy high-welfare free-range grass-fed beef, too, and sometimes I do that.)
Does America really have like 99% factory chicken or has free-range made some inroads since I left there 10+ years ago?
Yup - I think there's argument too that carbon sequestration in good quality meadows means that the environmental impact of grass reared cows is potentially much less than for more factory farmed cows. I'd like to see the numbers rerun to consider ethically reared.
For what it's worth, all the red meat we've eaten in the last 12 months was bred by us (lamb), and the pork was bred by our neigbours. We're going to try to breed chickens for meat this summer and if it takes then all our meat will be home grown.
When I was still living in Los Angeles, many restaurants served "jidori chicken" that they claimed was good in this way. I'm a vegetarian so I didn't particularly investigate.
Pasture raised meat is even cheaper than Beyond Burgers. An ethically raised meat animal gets a happy life and a better death than most wild animals. There's just no reason to continue worrying about meat alternatives. We just need to stop doing the horrifyingly awful thing and get back to doing the actually great thing.
For those in the Bay Area who have a chest freezer, I recommend the following sources for extremely high quality, humane, relatively low-carbon-intensity, conveniently packaged meat that is reasonably priced per pound when bought in chest-freezer-filling bulk amounts:
-- Marin Sun Farms for beef and pork (for my household, we ordered a quarter cow and some friends ordered a half hog and we swapped cuts; this is on track to last us 8-10 months)
-- Pasturebird for chicken (the spatchcocked half chickens are super convenient; I ordered a package of 20 halves in January and it's just about time to order another)
We started doing this as a pandemic prepping measure and are likely to continue post-pandemic because we like both the ethics and the taste so much better than grocery store meat.
Oh, and Vital Farms eggs are available from lots of grocery stores and are very good value for the level of quality-- notably, their yolks are the darker orange of European egg yolks and they taste more like European eggs than standard US supermarket ones.
Also important to note, for those taking their own enjoyment into account: There is a marked difference in quality between factory-farmed meat (especially chicken), and ethically-raised meat. I pay 4x more per unit weight for free-range whole chickens vs grocery store whole chickens, plus I get necks, feet and giblets with the free-range ones (great for making stock).
Source: https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf Sorry, but I don't understand how this soil carbon capture business with grazing works. Sure, if there is more grass you will capture more carbon, but this effect is not cumulative. Also, when comparing to plant-based foods, the alternative is not over-grazed land (like you get with regular cattle-grazing), but rather reforestation which in turn will capture more carbon than grass fields.
"A factory farmed chicken lives about thirty days, usually in extreme suffering."
Unless I missed it, the above seemed to be as close as you get... but why not touch on the *difference* in conditions than factory-farmed cows vs. chickens are raised in? My understanding - which I think is reflected in Brian Tomasik's table here: https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/ - is that chickens suffer much more in captivity than cows.
I'd be interested in a "Carbon offests: much more than you wanted to know" type post that investigates the situation in consumer-level carbon offsetting. I've bought some in the past and couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was, uh, somewhat imaginary.
I would like to write this but last time I looked into it I wasn't able to find great data.
Everyone is aware of the problem where one person who isn't cutting down trees can sell their not-cutting-down-trees-ness to hundreds of carbon offset sites (and then cut down the trees later). Most carbon offset groups claim to have some solution to this, but they don't give a great description of exactly what this is.
There are now direct air capture offsets (where you can pay a machine to take carbon out of the air). These are provably useful, but they're about 100x less efficient than the not-cutting-down-trees kind.
I've considered buying a New Zealand carbon credit for NZD35 or so and then not using it as a reasonable balance between concrete and affordable. I realise this has failure modes too, but I figure it's more robust than an individual forest owner somewhere, people have to collectively lose faith in either the cap and trade scheme or the entire effort of controlling atmospheric carbon for it to fail.
Many cheap "low-hanging-fruit" carbon offsets like "Not-cutting-down-trees" are quite limited. There is a finite amount of trees in the world you can avoid cutting down. Direct air capture on the other hand - while expensive - can be used to suck out an "infinite" amount of Co2. This implies that unless we come up with cheaper ways of removing carbon from the atmosphere, the cost of carbon offsets will greatly increase in the future as we run out of trees to not cut down. This leads me to think that the "true" cost of carbon offsets is probably way higher than $10.
Yes. This is a major concern for me. Even if the easy-to-do offsets are only sold once and really get done, it seems like in any possible world where we beat global warming, those are all things that would have happened anyway, and the *marginal* cost of the *additional* offset that *someone* in the world will ultimately need to do in order to cover whatever-you-were-buying-an-offset-for will end up being much more expensive.
By substitution, any at-scale air capture would better use their energy inputs to displace existing carbon-emitting input to the grid.
(Doing *research* into air-capture is fine, because we may someday have a clean enough grid that we really want to start using excess energy to decarbonize the air.)
Thanks. That's along the lines I would think, that unless our power grid was abundantly non-fossil fuel, trying to use carbon-derived power to remove carbon is pointless. We may want to do some of it just to advance the technology, though. We may find much less energy-dependent means of removing carbon that could be used in the future.
The organization I buy offsets from (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/climate-protection-projects/) doesn't support forest-related projects for that reason (among others). Instead they focus on things like providing fuel efficient wood stoves and supporting green energy production in poor countries.
These projects seem easier to certify/protect against double counting than "not cutting down trees" and also do immediate good in improving living conditions for many people, which I don't think would be the case for direct air capture offsets.
It's more pricy than not cutting down trees though, they currently ask 23€ per ton.
Can someone explain how the offsetting transaction works? Party A gives $ to Party B to offset X. In exchange for $, what does Party B do that offsets suffering or carbon emissions or whatever?
The mechanics seem super hand savvy to me. It looks like the old Catholic indulgence where parishioners paid for their relatives to spend less time in purgatory. Both indulgences and offsets sound unmeasurable and unenforceable.
Carbon offsets usually work by paying for either some sort of carbon absorbing (eg. planting trees) or by paying for replacing carbon-heavy fuels with carbon-light fuels, usually in low income communities. Suffering offsets seem a bit more dubious to me, since I can't really offset one animal's suffering with another animal's joy.
I think the idea there is that the suffering offsets go to organizations that promote meat alternatives or work to improve conditions on farms, thus reducing suffering.
The idea is that if I kill one chicken, and then pay someone else not to kill one chicken, I am neutral with respect to chickens killed. One way of paying someone else not to kill one chicken is eg donating to organizations that advertise eating less meat.
Or if I emit 1 kg of carbon, and then pay someone else not to emit 1 kg of carbon, I am carbon-neutral. The easiest way to do this is to pay people with trees not to cut them down, but this is complicated. The harder but simpler way is to pay people with carbon-removal-machines to remove carbon.
Are you ethically neutral with respect to the people involved, though? That is, *who* is going to take your money to not eat a chicken? If it's someone well-off such as yourself, then maybe it's an even trade, but what if it's a poor person who is desperate enough to replace his nourishing diet of chicken for something more squalid?
One can make a comparison to wealthy people in the Civil War paying poor people to take their places in the draft. In some sense, it's all equal -- one person was called, one person served, and the person called was responsible for supplying the person that served, and did. But it still strikes most of us as ethically dubious, because of the exploitation of the economic distress of others.
I think that's a question well worth pondering in the whole new field of environmental indulgences. *Who* is selling the carbon offsets? If the First World just ends up paying a lot of Third World people to *not* emerge from primitive lifestyles -- to stick with donkeys instead of getting tractors, to live in huts instead of fossil-fuel heated houses, this doesn't really feel like ethical progress.
Buying offsets in the form of someone else NOT taking some action seems like it will obviously lead to people threatening to do something just so that they can be paid for not doing it.
Also, there are double-counting risks if different people feel guilty based on different rules. e.g. Suppose Alice and Bob are each emitting 1kg of carbon, and both want to improve. Alice pays Bob $1 to stop emitting carbon. Alice now feels OK because she has offset her carbon. Bob now feels OK because he's not directly emitting any carbon. Two people now feel good about themselves (no longer feel they need to improve), but only one of them actually stopped emitting.
"Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten."
*Surely* this isn't case? Those chickens will still get sold to other people and then eaten, possibly at reduced price if your refusal to buy them affects demand. The real calculus will have to be how the reduced demand from your refusal to chicken affect prices and supply in the medium to long term.
"possibly at reduced price if your refusal to buy them affects demand"
Well, the demand for chicken (at some price) is the sum of how much chicken people are willing to buy (at that price), so refusing to buy chicken definitionally lowers the demand curve by exactly one chicken. (Unless you're saying something else?)
(The Econ101 language of analysis is that how many chickens get saved will depend on the **price-elasticities** of chicken supply and chicken demand, like you were getting at; presumably refusing to eat 1 chicken saves more than 0 and less than 1 chickens. Googling turns up various estimates of the price-elasticities but I don't know how to evaluate their accuracy.)
Sure, but this is a lot different than saying that this particular chicken might not get eaten. It's even conceivable that your refusal to eat this chicken will not result (slightly) reduced production at all - it might just result in (slightly) reduced price.
This seem likely (not sure if it's certain - could the industry potentially just get by at the same size but lower margin?), but we're a long way away from saving an individual chicken by not eating it at this point.
Like I said, I would expect that it would do *some combination* of slightly reducing production and slightly reducing price, depending on the elasticity of the supply and demand. (If you've sketched supply & demand curves before you can see where I'm coming from here.) It seems intuitively implausible that chicken demand is perfectly price-elastic or that chicken supply is perfectly price-inelastic. I.e., it seems implausible to me that shifting demand down will *only* reduce price. (It also seems implausible to me that it will *only* reduce the quantity.) Light Googling seems to confirm this (though I haven't researched enough to be able to know which of the competing estimates of the price-elasticities to trust).
Personally, I care about my own health more than I care about chicken vs cow suffering. Can we express these numbers as "chickens saved per expected day of decrease in the eater's lifespan"?
See section 4.2 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ . The best studies suggest vegetarians live about 3 years longer (though they are not very confident), so if you eat meat once daily for 80 years, maybe each meat-based meal is taking ~1 hour off your life.
This is further complicated in at least two ways. Removing years from the end of your life may not be that bad, if the last years of your life are less meaningful or enjoyable than earlier years. Assuming that the meat-based diet also leads to reduced health in the years actually lived (you'll have a worse life at 77 instead of that starting at 80, as one possibility), you would still have to weigh the amount of happiness reduction in those years verses the amount of reduced happiness spread out over a lifetime without the more pleasurable meals.
For some people the meat adds no pleasure, so that's easy to discern. For others that would be a miserable life, such that they would rather die much earlier than live without meat. Most of us have some level of happiness reduction without meat, even if it's very hard to measure or generalize.
Chicken and Cows are largely carbon neutral. All of their carbon emissions are part of the normal cycle. This is similar to why burning new-growth wood is carbon neutral.
If there are X chickens in an area before humans/factory farms arrive, and then humans/factory farms increase the number of chickens by 100x, doesn't that mean the chicken-related amount of carbon will also increase by 100x? Once you agree it's increasing carbon by 100x something, what difference does it make if it counts as "natural" or not?
I think you might want to make this more precise. The chickens themselves are necessarily carbon-neutral. All the carbon in the chicken comes from plants, which means it comes from atmospheric CO2, and to that it returns when the chicken is metabolized.
The only way for something to be carbon-positive is if somewhere in the past it involves a withdrawal from a long-lived carbon repository, e.g. sedimentary rock, the deep ocean, fossil fuels. So chicken *farming* is carbon-positive because the farmer burns fossil fuels to heat the barn, drive the tractor around, take the chickens to market, et cetera. In principle you *could* make chicken-farming carbon neutral, if you burned dried grass to heat the barn, and used biodiesel in your tractor (although even they you have the fossil-fuel cost inherent in your physical plant, so let's say you also build everything from local sticks and stones).
Just being a smartass :) but that is not actually the case. You can form carbon via fission and radioactive decay also, e.g. boron-12 decays to carbon-12 with a halflife of 20ms, and nitrogen-13 decays to carbon-12 with a halflife of 10min. It would be a very rare fission event that spalled off a C-12 nucleus, but it's certainly possible.
I think I may be getting tripped up by the "carbon-equivalent" facet of the problem. There are presumably chemical reactions inside a cow that can produce greenhouse gasses, like methane, where previously there were none. So while a cow's lifetime may be, strictly speaking, carbon-neutral, for the purposes of the atmosphere, it's not carbon-equivalent-neutral because of creating new methane.
The entire system, grass the cow eats + cow's digestion + bacteria in the cow's gut, just create a detour for atmospheric CO2, like so:
1. atmospheric CO2 -> photosynthesis -> cellulose
2. cellulose -> bacteria -> organic acids + H2
3. acids + H2 -> different bacteria -> CH4
4. CH4 -> atmospheric rxn with OH -> CO2
The timescale here is ~10 years, so basically CO2 from the atmosphere takes a 10-year detour through life as CH4, and for those 10 years will worsen the global greenhouse effect (probably), since, C atom for C atom, the CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas than the CO2 it is temporarily replacing. Would it contribute to any *permanent* shift in climate? Not unless it triggers something otherwise irreversible during the 10-year detour. (Such things conceivably exist, however, so this consideration is not vacuous.)
Interesting. That makes sense. So, even considering that some of the gasses the cow releases might heat the planet more than others, because it's all part of the same cycle, each particular cow's lifetime could only cause a temporary change to the atmosphere, after which it eventually goes back to how it was before the cow was born. Which is a completely different thing from bringing oil up from underground and burning it, which permanently adds new carbon to the atmosphere.
I presume the idea is that one of those is a one-shot increase while the other is an ongoing increase.
If I burn 1kg of coal, one time, that puts some amount of carbon into the air. If I continue burning 1kg of coal per year, it puts more and more carbon into the air every year that I continue doing it.
If I burn a tree, that puts some amount of carbon into the air. If I burn that tree, then grow a new tree to replace it, then burn the replacement, then replace it again, etc. then I am not *continuing* to add carbon to the air. There may have been an increase in carbon from the "first" tree that I burned, but as long as I don't burn the "second" one until I've finished growing the replacement for the first, then there's no long-term buildup.
I think the argument is that the carbon emitted by chickens and cows comes from the plants they eat, and regrowing those plants to feed the next batch of cows/chickens takes that carbon back out of the air (just like regrowing the tree that I burned).
Of course, to some extent, ALL "net-zero" arguments are accounting tricks unless they look at the planet as a whole. What actually happened is that I released carbon by burning a tree, and then captured carbon by growing a tree. One of those was net-positive and one of those was net-negative. Calling some particular things "net netural" is a matter of choosing which events you're going to group together for the analysis.
I think that offset prices are still meaningful in the presence of "market failures" as long as the offsets themselves actually work. In other words, as long as it is, in fact, possible to stop Yog Sothoth from consuming a galaxy for $1, I think it's correct to say that eating a chicken (and thus arousing the hunger of Yog) has a $1 moral cost.
If it's actually possible to abate the hunger of Yog with a $1 donation, every $1 purchase made is a missed opportunity to spare a galaxy of intelligent life from unimaginable suffering. Therefore the only reason that Yog should be consuming any galaxies is because every person with dollars has decided not to forgo $1 worth of consumption in order to save a galaxy, _including_ the person eating the chicken. Spending $3 on a coffee in this world is exactly 3X as bad, in terms of destroyed galaxies, as consuming one free chicken.
And likewise, if it's actually possible to abate a ton of carbon with 33 cents, then it's genuinely possible to trade 3 tons of carbon for one galaxy. Every person in this world who gives any amount of money to the Stop Yog fund and the Clean Energy Initiative (or whatever) must be willing to trade one galaxy for 3 tons of carbon. In a real sense, the moral judgment of this society is that a galaxy is as bad as 3 tons of carbon.
But how about market failures? Any traditional sense of market failure should refer to:
1) Externalities
2)
3) Information Asymmetry
The obvious one here is externalities: the costs of Yogging and polluting accrue mostly to people other than the Yogger/polluter. But in both cases, what we're concerned about is pure externality, so it's hard to think about externalities as causing more of a market failure in one context relative to another. Any internal costs and benefits of Carbon/Yog aren't really part of the moral calculus to begin with.
Market power is essentially irrelevant here. It's not particularly relevant if the stop yog fund is charging above-market prices for Yog abatement: I can still get them to Yogproof a galaxy for $1.
And information asymmetry boils down to saying that I might not really know if my donation is stopping Yog. Maybe my donation saves a galaxy, maybe it goes toward a cardboard sign that says "say no to yog" on a galaxy that was never appetizing in the first place. If I can't tell the true Yogsbanes from the grifters, maybe I keep my dollar in my pocket. But in this case, it's just not true that it costs $1 to stop Yog from eating a galaxy, because it's not true that I could give up a dollar to save a galaxy.
This sort of Singeresque utilitarian chain of logic has led me to the conclusion that very few people actually believe in catastrophic anthropogenic climate change; my thought is it’s actually a kind of character signaling, like wearing a mask after being fully vaccinated: “I recognize that doing this benefits no one, but I want to send the signal that we should take stronger collective action on similar problems.”
Yeah, the observed behavior simply does not seem to match the urgency of the message.
One of the best examples of this, I think, is South Florida, which is very liberal. Despite the implications of the predicted anthropogenic climate change, there has been no particular exodus from an area that is slated for devastation, economic disaster, etc. And perhaps we could expect this from some segment of the population, but there should be a measurable and obvious effect on property development or residency, and there isn’t.
Either their implicit confidence in the ability of the government to mitigate costs is very high, or catastrophic climate change seems very unlikely. Or, perhaps, the future discount rate is extremely high and effects of climate change are reasonably far off, I suppose: that could be it, but I would think the evolutionary impulse to provide for one’s heirs by not investing in the equivalent of a plantation on the slope of an active volcano would be stronger than this.
Well, the whole argument tries to reach zero sum morality of different acts. It's not a question of 'should we do x?' but of 'should we do x or y?'.
That said, I agree. There's an unaddressed black swan risk of catastrophic climate change. As in, we assume the model itself makes sense and that we have not vastly underestimated any of the risks.
This is sort of touched on in the Lovecraft section, but IMO it makes the whole thing shakily reasoned. It's like caveating that an argument works only if the world works exactly as the argument describes, which is tautological. If each unit carbon is mispriced on the high end because it doesn't factor in the small benefit of literally saving humanity, then this whole analysis doesn't work.
I am undecided whether this is another naïve-utilitarianism problem or mankind is essentially utility-irrational. Leaning toward the former: utility is just not properly calculable and so we end up with a lot of absurd results at the margins.
I continue to wear a mask after being vaccinated, and I disagree that it benefits no one. Vaccination is not perfectly effective, and wearing a mask costs me nothing, so it seems like the rational choice. I hope that it also helps normalize continued mask-wearing, for the benefit of those who cannot be vaccinated or for whom vaccination is less effective. And masks help prevent respiratory infections other than COVID.
Seems like this argument proves too much; if wearing masks has no costs and the benefits you say it does, everyone should continue to wear masks forever.
I think you should be allowed your preference, but the reasoning and evidence for it seems poor to me, so I think I’ll continue to say that there is no further benefit: this seems to be true on net.
I mean, I think people should continue to wear underwear forever too, and underwear is undeniably more uncomfortable than masks.
Both masks and underwear will always be relevant for some contexts. The question is just how many contexts. (I don't imagine the person you are replying to wears a mask while alone inside their own home, and I imagine if we look through lots and lots of cases, we'll discover fewer disagreements than you might expect about which situations are ones where wearing a mask is currently helpful, and might continue to be helpful years from now.)
Really? I always wear underwear, even when home alone, overwhelmingly because of its practical usefulness, and in most settings nobody would guess if I didn't.
You didn't make an actual argument against "everyone should continue to wear masks forever". If doing so costs them nothing, then I think they should. Many people, of course, will find that it does cost them something.
No, I didn’t. No offense, but I have already considered this and have no faith that novel, interesting aspects will suddenly emerge that make your argument, such as it is, more compelling. As such I had no desire to engage further.
Masks do have costs, though. Presumably masks wear out, and obviously need to be purchased in the first place. If everyone in the world wore one disposable mask per day, we would be looking at ~8 billion masks thrown out daily, at a cost of $4 billion a day. But those are not the worst costs of wearing masks.
Consider these as well:
We have trouble recognizing individuals or learning who new people are if we cannot see their faces.
Facial expressions convey significant meaning, both in terms of communication but also developing relationships.
We have trouble understanding people when they speak, because the mask muffles the sounds and also because we cannot see their lips move to help.
Deaf people and other lip-readers literally cannot participate in conversations.
Masks that are not cleaned, or are worn for long periods of time, develop bacteria, molds, and other harmful pathogens, which are then breathed in repeatedly.
Individuals with asthma and other breathing difficulties may have significant reactions to limited oxygen from wearing a mask - and I have trouble believing that those without asthma have no negative effects from reduced oxygen as well.
Mask-wearing may be lower cost than what you feel you gain from it, but there are huge costs to continued mask wearing.
The comment I replied to claimed that vaccinated people who continue to wear masks must merely be engaged in virtue signaling because wearing them has no benefit. To answer that, I need only show that such people may *believe* they have benefits, which I have done, making the commenter’s assumption superfluous.
Obviously, at some point, continuing to wear masks may have costs for some people, who might then cease wearing them. I already have a bunch of reusable masks, so their purchase cost is no longer relevant. In the course of a day, I may encounter hundreds of people by whom I have no desire to be recognized and with whom I do not wish to communicate. If I did want to communicate with someone and found that my mask hindered it, I suppose I could lower it long enough to finish the conversation, which would not in any way negate the benefit of wearing it during the hundreds of other encounters. I wash my masks regularly and do not wear them for long periods of time. Tests have shown that masks do not limit one’s access to oxygen.
So, yes, *some people* might find that the costs of wearing masks outweigh the benefits. Others, like me, find the benefits outweigh the costs. I think a reasonable person would suppose that the people they saw still wearing masks were in the second category, instead of imputing silly motives to them.
I struggle with these kinds of estimates of carbon cost. A cost of $10/ton where the average American releases 17.5 tons per year implies that all of America's contribution to global warming can be erased for less than half a dollar per person per day. I think if that was true it would have happened already.
Another commenter points out (I think correctly) that this is likely because offsets are currentl rare enough that easy, cheap methods of offsetting are still readily available. To try and offset _all_ our production would rapidly swamp these options and leave only more and more expensive options until eventually it gets cheaper to pay for the massive battery banks or whatever and stop producing.
So it's only so cheap because almost no one is doing it.
Which, to my mind, doesn't mean one shouldn't do it.
It's pretty clear that the costs of climate compensation overall is _vastly_ higher than this number, but it's conceivable that we do so little that there's an amount of low-hanging fruit that can be picked at a very low cost.
Sweden is a rare country that has a decent CO2 tax at $127/ton, but even this is probably too low, and something like $250 would likely be better. Once we have large-scale carbon sequestration, it will be easier to tell for sure.
Even at this point though, it tells you that it's not a massive deal - it's not some truly gargantuan cost to fix the AGW problem, and it can be measured in a few thousands of dollars per capita per year - and much less if you start out by making the cheap, simple efficiency fixes. Sweden has emissions at 5.5 tons per capita, less than a third of the U.S., at little obvious cost. Some of this is luck with hydroelectric, but that's just a part of it.
This lead to the simple CO2 solution - tax CO2 at the cost to either fix the damage or to compensate. Apply import tolls of the same cost on countries that refuse to do this. (Maybe do something similar to methane.)
The EU is starting to lean in this direction, and if the EU and the U.S. would do this is a block, it would solve most of the problem in one stroke.
Bit off topic but maybe still worth thinking about:
I think the offsets will be larger. The price of, say, 10$/ton of CO2 is low at the moment because there are currently quite a few low hanging fruits for CO2 offsetting. As soon as this will be more popular, prices will go up, not/not only because of capitalism, but also because it will be more and more difficult to find cheap ways for compensating a ton of CO2. Otherwise, I mean, let each citizen pay 17.5 * 10 = 175$ climate tax each year and the problem would be solved.
This is pure speculation, and I would much appreciate a more informed reader's comments on it.
There's also the question of timing. Maybe that $10/ton means "we will *eventually*" remove a ton of CO2 for you, but it might take several years." So that would no longer work if you needed to remove 18 tons per person *per year*.
I am endlessly perplexed (and a little vexed) that otherwise-sensible-seeming people assign moral value to the suffering of animals who cannot possibly reciprocate. What am I missing?
Why should compassion be the standard for morality?
Being more specific: compassion is an emotion. It comes from a dumb part of your brain and is subject to a lot of pretty terrible biases; you'll feel more or less compassion for somebody depending on how good-looking they are, what race they are, who they remind you of, how physically near they are to you, how well you know them, and so forth.
In order to treat people (or animals) fairly you need to start by disregarding compassion.
I feel empathy towards cute animals, I think because they remind me a bit of human babies. I probably wouldn't enjoy *watching* them suffer. But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents, I don't feel bothered in the slightest by their abstract suffering. Nor do I understand how any rationalist could.
At what point does a living thing become a moral agent? Would a mentally disabled human being meet that standard? How about an infant that is known to be mentally disabled?
To me, these questions prove the limits of an ethical system that grants moral importance only to those beings on equal intellectual standing. The important thing, to those rationalists who are bothered by animal suffering, is that animals are obviously capable of experiencing terror, pain, and other basic emotions both positive and negative. It almost seems like you're measuring the worth of other beings purely by how much your empathy is incidentally engaged by them.
> At what point does a living thing become a moral agent? Would a mentally disabled human being meet that standard? How about an infant that is known to be mentally disabled?
I would resolve the issue by saying the following: Strictly speaking, mentally disabled individuals shouldn't count as moral agents, but we should treat them as if they are because it's easier, neater, cleaner, and more aesthetically pleasing for our moral system to accept a few false positives than to try to identify exactly where the dividing line lies between humans who do and do not have moral worth.
"Human rights for humans" is a pretty workable Schelling point, much better than "human rights for anything with IQ > 40".
but from where do you derive the moral standing of humans? if you just summon it from nothing, you can (fairly, i think) be charged with speciecism. it seems arbitrary. the line might be drawn anywhere. you would have no argument against someone saying only people from their country, say, have moral standing, or people of their ethnicity.
What's wrong with specieism? Every *other* species on the planet is totally self-centered -- lions do what is best for lions, ants do what is best for ants. Why should we be different? And if we *are* different -- if we have unique responsibilities, does it also follow we have unique powers and rights, too?
> But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents...
I think you have a mistaken view of how rationality relates to emotional phenomena like empathy. The reason you don't feel bothered by their suffering probably isn't because you reasoned it through and found they aren't legitamate moral agents; I think that kind of stuff is largely pre-rational, at least in the moment of considering it (maybe a person can use reason to shift their views over longer periods of time). So maybe you're just not wired to care about that stuff, meanwhile we are.
> Nor do I understand how any rationalist could [feel bothered by it]
Again I think you have a misunderstanding of the relationship between rationality and emotions. How is your empathy toward human babies any more rational than empathy toward non-human animals, or empathy toward rocks for that matter? If it's a matter of reciprocation, the question just gets pushed back further to the question of why caring about "reciprocation" is rational. If that's a matter of your own suffering, you have to ask why caring about your own suffering is rational, and I think I'd assert there's really no getting underneath that one. You either care about nothing or you care about something without a rationale.
The agent/reciprocity argument is basically how I see it as well. It's why I wouldn't expect aliens to eat us if they showed up, unless we're like insects to them. If it's more useful to trade with you, then that's what they'll do.
Looking at it this way, there are some animals that you might be able to extend some view of morality to, since they seem to understand what it means to cooperate with humans (smart dogs, dolphins?).
If you focus on suffering, is it then ok if we genetically engineer animals to not suffer from factory farming (or even enjoy it)? I somehow suspect that would still be objectionable, so I end up not really believing the suffering line.
> But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents, I don't feel bothered in the slightest by their abstract suffering. Nor do I understand how any rationalist could.
Suppose a superintelligent AI or alien race describes to you a category that humans are too dumb to understand, say "uber-morality", and then employ your argument to justify causing human suffering, would they be justified? If so, then I commend your consistency.
If not, then I have to ask 1) where you draw the line of "moral agent" and why animals couldn't qualify, and 2) why they shouldn't be given consideration within a moral system despite not being moral agents.
I'm a bit confused by this question. Are you similarly perplexed (and vexed) that otherwise-sensible-seeming people assign economic value to bars of gold who cannot possibly reciprocate? Or am I missing the point?
Right, but I don't understand why reciprocating value is important to either. Morality is very often concerned with people who don't reciprocate, so I'm confused as to why you think it has to involve reciprocation.
I think that moral and economic value both derive from the preferences of beings that have preferences, and neither depends on reciprocity.
I don't personally believe that moral worth has to involve reciprocity. That said, there are obvious differences in kind between economic value and moral value.
One key difference is that morality generally has to do with conduct relating to living things that can feel, experience, grow. Economic value can exist in an automated machine world with no living beings and no subjective preferences.
I believe in inherent moral worth, but not based on reciprocity.
I want to live in a world where a sufficiently more advanced species than myself doesn't neglect all meaning and suffering in my life when making their decisions about whether or not to conquer our planet and take all of its resources. Given that that is the case, I feel morally obligated to also consider the meaning and suffering in the lives of species that I am more advanced than. Even moral considerations aside, our behaviour towards cows and chickens could well be part of a negotiation between us and a much more advanced species.
I'm familiar with the research, but do you have any evidence that there actual commercial farms doing this in a way that means I can buy kelp-fed beef?
As far as I know, the research hasn't been broadly implemented since it's so new and there are relatively few kelp farms, but it's something to look out for in the future. So, no, you can't buy kelp-fed beef just yet, but I anticipate it'll be coming soon, especially in Australia where the kelp species used in the research so far grows.
I would think health differences should factor in to this decision.
But also, it's hard for me to wrap my head around the mindset that one could take animal suffering or CO2 emissions from meat eating seriously enough to do this math and alter their diet or pay for offsets but not just...stop eating or rarely eat meat.
Why? Paying $400/year seems much easier than becoming a vegetarian (especially if you're rich). It seems totally plausible to me that people might care enough to do an easy thing, but not enough to do a hard thing.
I also feel like if I felt actual guilt about the animal I'm eating suffering, my brain does not compute someone saying it doesn't count if I make payments I'm not sure work. The meat is still in front of me!
Maybe I could keep eating the meat by not thinking about it, but not if I already know. And doing this math and then believing my own math enough to fork over money would mean I think I know it's bad. Bad as in something I don't want to do but I'm still doing because...it tastes good?
I can't wrap my head around it, really. I stopped eating meat when I started getting what I think was psychosomatically sick to my stomach any time I ate it because my brain believed it was bad.
If you're rich, you could throw money at deliciously prepped non meat foods. And maybe pay offsets for your friends, family, or pets who don't or can't care (in case offsets work?).
The difficulty is definitely subjective and goes down over time as you get used to it. I think it was harder back in 2010 when I first stopped eating meat but I'm constantly pleased with how much easier it's getting as it becomes trendier.
As long as I'm not strict about occasionally ignoring chicken broth or having seafood a few times a year in social situations with limited menus, it's like ignoring options I just don't even like, a non thought.
If I lived in a group house with meat eaters and didn't make my own food, that would be more difficult I suppose, but would someone in that scenario even be able to pick all chicken or all beef?
While not yet confirmed to be ransomware, let's assume it is. In the moral calculus outlined in Scott's post surely the cyberattack is a net good since the reduced cow suffering and cow related carbon emissions caused by the attack outweighs the CO2 involved in the bitcoin transaction that will be used to pay the ransom, no?
Depends on how you account for the good and bad produced by all the other cyberattacks that will be inspired by this one (on oil wells and hospitals alike).
Does anyone actually care about any of this with respect to their dietary decisions. For most people these are visceral not mathematical decisions. For example, after having visited (my father’s) chicken hatcheries, production and beef packing plants (for all, read “slaughtering” houses) when I was about 9, I haven’t eaten any bird or mammal. It’s not a function of any rationalist judgment. At some point it was clear that I couldn’t consider eating certain things. For about 20 years I was a vegetarian. Then, I tried to distinguish the source of my eating habits. I realized that I couldn’t abstract from the killing process. But, there was some killing I could tolerate and would do. Namely fishing. Although I didn’t then eat fish, I had fished and gutted fish. That truth led to my starting to include fish in my diet. Not because it was more sustainable (it may not be) but because I would kill it. Therefore, I would eat it. Can I justify it by neuron count? No. Do I care? No.
When I see a hamburger I see a cow — one I would pet. When I see fried chicken I see my neighbor’s chickens whom I know by name and have held. These aren’t calculations. They’re either psychologically instinctual or ontologically driven.
To wit, most people who try to be vegan or vegetarian for environmental (CO2) reasons end up struggling and at some point either failing or internalizing a moral and visceral perspective. Again, rationalism largely fails here. It’s similar to the way that people stop exercising their new year resolution to work out by February. Either they internalize it into some ontological part of themselves, or they struggle and fail.
Given all that, the reality for most people is that mammals feel to us more akin us than do birds. We relate to them. We kiss our dogs, hug our horses, feel the run our hands over the velvety soft nose of cows. Birds seem more foreign, easier to prey upon. Again, not necessarily justifiable (as you demonstrate) but your argument is taking place in the wrong universe. That makes it irrelevant to actual dietary decisions.
"Does anyone actually care about any of this with respect to their dietary decisions." Yes. Personally, I eat red meat or dairy about once a week but never ever chicken or eggs (or fish) for exactly the reasons described in this post.
I try to be vegetarian, but when I cheat I make sure to cheat with beef rather than chicken, and I also offset it. I know several other people who eat beef but not chicken for the same reason.
I went vegetarian directly as a consequence of reading the argument that buying meat sends demand signals to factory farms, and thus my buying meat actually *causes* animal suffering.
Previously, I knew and cared that animals were suffering a lot in factory farms, but I didn't care about my own consumption because I assumed my individual contribution did not have any real effect at the farms. Once I was convinced that my purchasing of meat actually did have a causal chain leading to concretely more animals being raised, I became emotionally motivated to stop.
Tongue only loosely in cheek, this ends up seeming like an excellent argument to donate to charities which provide contraception. Assuming that <$175/year provides funding to prevent at least one new human (which seems like a reasonable guess) you can "offset" your entire life's consumption of not just meat but all carbon-emitting goods and services for the same or less than commercial carbon offsets. Plus improve the quality of life for women in need of health care!
You don't have to make it mandatory. I would guess there are millions of women in Bangladesh or Nigeria who are so desperately poor that they would gladly take $200 -- for them a princely sum that could seed a whole new life -- to be sterilized. The ethics here are pretty troubling, though.
I would be surprised if $175/month could prevent a human. That might be the base cost of contraception, but you can't save a starving person for the cost of food, or a diabetic for the cost of insulin. I don't have a great explanation for why other than that it takes a lot of money and resources to find/reach the right person who needs help, and you need to help a lot of people who would eventually be okay without your help in order to hit the one person who wouldn't.
If you are doing comparisons of the number of suffering chickens vs. number of suffering cows, should you also multiply by their respective lifespans? (i.e. how long they suffer for) Why or why not?
I think you should. I don't care about the killing; I only care about the suffering. I have done that math, and if I recall, the numbers still come out firmly in favor of eating beef over chicken.
Somewhat nitpicky -- but the CO2Equivalent numbers you're using for methane are on a 100-year timescale. When we consider the CO2E of methane on a 20 year time scale, it's 3x as high. (put plainly: methane emissions from cattle burps are responsible for 20% of all warming in the next two decades).
I'd love a source for that "20%" thing. I have found articles claiming that _the entire climate impact of human agriculture_ is on the order of 20-ish %.
The linked guesstimate (https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10897) in the EA post you cited for the chicken estimate (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9ShnvD6Zprhj77zD8/animal-equality-showed-that-advocating-for-diet-change-works, "But what if it were chicken?") seems to say that it actually costs $0.82 to spare a chicken, not $6; it gives $6.64 for the cost to avert a chicken year. But the EA post itself says that it costs "$5.70 per chicken spared (90% interval: $0.71 to $32) and $50 per chicken year (90% interval: 6.3 to 280)". I'm confused. Maybe either the EA post or the guesstimate were updated without the other also being updated?
Possibly too tangential, but: Did anyone ever figure out why Yudkowsky is so confident that most animals, including chickens and cows, don't have qualia? (Referenced but not spelled out here, as well as some other places: https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/.) I'm very curious what his (presumably partial) solution to the hard problem of consciousness is.
Oddly enough, after reading that I suspect he's committing the same "typical mind" fallacy that he cavalierly accuses others of in a few places on that page. Specifically he thinks reflectivity resulting in something like an "inner listener" is necessary to qualia. I suspect typical-minding because I used to have the sense of an inner listener that he describes, and I considered it fundamentally important in defining my self, but it went away after meditation while qualia remained. As a result of that, and separately of light experimentation with drugs, I became much more of the opinion that people's experiences can be really quite different from each other in ways that cannot be communicated effectively to people who haven't had similar experiences.
What about the price of the meat itself? Chicken is significantly cheaper per calory than beef, leaving me with a budget surplus that I could then use to pay for the chicken offset. Or effects on your person health for that matter, my impression is that chicken is healthier than beef, and being healthier would allow me to work more overtime, earning more money once again.
I think the model here is far too simplistic, which is my issue with effective altruism in general - reality is complex and I could easy choose a different set of effects to focus on to argue for the opposite conclusion.
I did this moral math a few years ago (they are somewhere at the old blog, I asked a bunch of questions over a few OTs). But the ethically raised chicken seems cheaper than the beef, meaning I could just "buy the offset" by paying for the ethical chicken.
Does marginal spending on carbon offsets actual cause more carbon to be offset? I worry that we have, say, 1 billion tons of carbon offsetting capacity right now and if more people want to carbon offset, the price just goes up without the capacity increasing. Now increasing the demand for carbon offsets would increase the incentive for people to build out carbon offsets and that's plausible, but does it happen at a 1:1 rate? I'm sure economists have tried to quantify stuff like this and I'm just ignorant of the terminology.
I think this mostly shows how the "offset" concept is flawed. It's not what consequentialism is trying to get at - the offset donation is not causally connected to eating the meat - and it's used as a 'noble lie' to get people to donate at least something to charity despite being reluctant to give an altruistic amount, but like all noble lies it's incompatible with clarity of thought. Trying to staple it together with economics and its (also fictional) perfectly rational actors is a case of making two simplifying assumptions that contradict each other. Ultimately, the answer has to be to do the math on "direct animal suffering" vs. "risk of apocalypse / human suffering from global warming", and only consider money if actually making a charitable donation. The former is probably bigger, and certainly easier to quantify, which feels to me like it should carry more weight somehow.
For my part, I follow a principle of not eating mammals, which I adopted a long time ago because it's a relatively bright line while leaving me able to eat *something* in most restaurants / social settings. For myself I buy fish. In principle beef causes less suffering than chicken, but I've kept to the deontological rule in this case, though perhaps I should change that.
(On neuron counts - it's not obvious to me whether the function should be steeper than linear. Killing a bunch of individual neurons doesn't seem as bad as killing a single animal with all of them connected... but, OTOH, linearity is stable with regards to fusing brains together, so maybe it's necessary to have it as the first approximation.)
I'm confused by the first paragraph. It doesn't seem to be a noble lie if you actually pay the offset (AFAIK it just works fine in that case). If you don't pay the offset, then you're using the market to set prices, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Well, 'noble lie' is imprecise, sure. It's a metric to get people to do something good by setting an arbitrary standard, that sets a Schelling point for limited altruism (because perfect altruism is too high a bar). But there's no actual reason that i.e. eating beef requires a carbon offset donation, nor that making the donation requires having eaten beef beforehand, nor anything fundamental that connects the quantities of the two. The moral option is to not eat the beef but still make the offset donation.
As to using money as a scale of measurement, as you said with the Yog-Sothoth example, the whole situation with no-brainer charity donation implies a market failure somewhere.
To me the moral calculus seems even more lopsided than that. I don't really care about the deaths of animal who don't make plans for the future, I care about their suffering and quality of life. On that basis chickens have utterly terrible lives and while cows experience some suffering in their lives, particularly at the end when they get shoved onto feedlots, but it seems that on net they probably have lives worth living? I think I'd rather be reincarnated as a cow than face non-existence.
> "Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten."
Well, it will depend on the price-elasticities of the chicken supply curve and the chicken demand curve, right?
E.g. on the supply side: Perfectly elastic supply means refusing to eat 1 chicken causes 1 fewer chicken to be eaten (and the price will stay the same); perfectly inelastic supply means refusing to eat 1 chicken causes 0 fewer chicken to be eaten (and the price will go down). (And then vice-versa for demand.)
In reality I assume the elasticities are somewhere in between, so on average every chicken that someone refuses to eat saves somewhere from 0 to 1 chickens on average.
Anyone have any empirical data on the elasticities of the chicken supply and demand curves? Or for other animals, for that matter — I guess all else equal, you can do more good the more elastic the supply and the more inelastic the demand for that animal.
> (it's still totally fair to eat chicken and donate $1 to the Stop Yog Sothoth Fund, it's just catastrophic if you abstract away the step where you donate the dollar)
that doesn't really seem like a perfect utilitarian calculation. of course one option is to eat a salad and not donate, and compared to that eating the chicken and donating seems fair. but another equally plausible option is to eat a salad and also to donate, and compared to that the expected utility of eating chicken and donating is terrible (one whole world lost).
> Either carbon offsets, animal suffering offsets, or both could be market failures like this. In fact, if you believe that we're currently not doing enough to fight climate change or animal suffering, I think you almost have to believe there are market failures in offsets.
how about believing that there are no market failures, but that there are low-hanging fruit, and the current offsetting prices are determined by changes on the margin, whereas average offsetting prices – if we tried to reduce animal product consumption completely to zero, say – would be much higher.
This is missing two important points. 1. Chickens have much shorter lives than cows and 2. The typical farmed chicken's life seems more miserable than the typical cow's.
The dilemma between decreasing CO2 but saving the lives of chickens vs cows is very much like Chappelle's genius bit about comparing Bill Cosby to a superhero that saves lives but rapes. "That's the dilemma for the audience. Because he rapes, but he saves a lot of lives. And he saves way more than he rapes, and he only rapes to save. But he does rape.”
"Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten." Not sure I agree with the argument here - the marginal chicken you decide not to eat is already dead and will now land in the bin. Your individual actions may have no impact but that doesn't absolve you from your moral responsibility.
it's true that you won't save those chickens, but it's not true that your individual action won't have any expected impact. quoting myself:
> The first argument goes as follows. The law of supply & demand says that when supply exceeds demand, prices go down. Take cattle ranchers, for example. They already maximise production in the area they have – they are not going to be producing less cattle if demand drops. Instead they will sell it at a lower price. But if they make any profit at all from their cattle, they will raise as much cattle as they can. Hence people going vegetarian won’t reduce meat consumption, because meat eaters will make up for the lost quantity demanded by buying more meat at cheaper prices.
>
> In economic terms, this argument makes the claim that the price of meat is perfectly elastic, that is, the price will adjust as demand changes. But from what I can tell from the literature, the price of meat is relatively inelastic, though it depends a little on the region & the type of meat.[4][5] That makes sense in the developed world at least (but likely elsewhere, too) as meat, for meat eaters, is something of a necessity; and moreover, if the price of meat fell, most people wouldn’t eat more meat for the simple reason that they already eat about as much meat as they want to.
>
> It’s true that the cattle rancher maximises production in the area they have & that they’re unlikely to start producing less cattle when demand drops. But at some point the price of purchase isn’t going to cover the costs of production anymore, especially taking opportunity costs into account.[6] So the whole ranch will have to fold & the rancher will need to find something else to do with the land, e.g. lease it to some developer.[7] And there will always be some cattle ranchers whose profit margins are very low; these will be the first to go when demand goes down.[8]
So this is vaguely related, and hopefully someone here can help me.
I've been trying to find information on the "ideal" diet from a climate perspective. This article is combining climate and ethical considerations (which I think is totally worthwhile), but if, for a moment, one completely ignored the ethical considerations of eating meat and _only_ cared about the climate impacts of one's diet, what would that diet look like?
From general reading/information floating around, I _feel_ like the "climate optimal" diet would a) involve a lot less meat consumption than your average American diet b) would probably involve very _very_ little beef but c) would not be entirely vegan/vegetarian.
However, I can't find any good sources that talk about this, explicitely.
For context, I ask because, given where I live and my living situation, I have the ability to get all or nearly all of my meat in a way that is, to my personal satisfaction, ethical. But, from a climate only perspective, I'm not sure how I should be allocating my diet.
The simplest answer I suppose is "don't worry about it, just buy offsets", which _does_ sort of solve my individual level problem, but I'm sort of interested in the long term societal options for how to feed everyone with the most climate-netural calories possible.
As a final note, I have been saying "climate impacts" this whole time, but that was mostly as shorthand. I am also interested in more general environmental impacts like water use, fertilizer runoff, etc. I know that that makes it more complicated so I'd accept sources that talk _only_ about climate impacts (CO2 equivalents etc.), but anything that _does_ incorporate more general environmental impact information would be great.
Climate impacts are complicated. It's very very hard to know _exactly_ what will happen, and most of them are likely bad (at the rate of change we are talking about). So I don't mean "ideal" in the sense of "best possible environment. I mean it in the sense of "lest likely to change the environment" since that's the option that has the least liklihood of breaking things.
In other words, given our current understanding of ecology, climate science, etc. if we _weren't_ pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, we would not decide to suddenly try it in the hopes of making things better. Given that, we should be trying to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere as well.
For what it's worth, I believe the concern from the most well-informed people is not so much about the end point, but about the rate of change. The argument is that, sure, the Earth can easily sustain a few degrees change in global average temp -- or CO2 levels. Much more significant changes have happened before, and life adapted just fine, even to changes that are much bigger in absolute magnitude than the biggest change in T or CO2 envisioned for anthropogenic causes. But only if it were slow enough, on at least a few thousand year time scale, the way even the fastest natural changes have.
On the time scale of a few thousand years, species can move north or south, the mix in any given location can re-arrange, new wind and sea circulation patterns can change patterns of fertility and land use -- but animals and vegetation can easily adapt to this (and presumably so can we).
But if it happens very fast, i.e. in 100 years, then (the argument goes) the natural world can't adapt fast enough. Ecosystem boundaries can't move fast enough. It's more like a meteor strike than like the end of the last Ice Age. Maybe if it took 5,000 years the agricultural prime land in North America jus tshifts to lower Canada, but ecosystems and people can adapt to that, and very little changes overall, but if happens in 50 years everything just dies because the growing zones move too fast and the entire continent becomes desert or grassland.
I'm not saying the argument is necessarily persuasive, but it's considerably more sophisticated than the naive "The Day After Tomorrow" silliness. We think life qua life suffered considerably after previous abrupt shocks, e.g. the putative Chicxulub meteor that may have had something to do with the K-T extinction event.
Presumably you would want to eat food that goes through the fewest steps between growing in a field and your dinner table. One of the prime reasons to remove meat is that it takes a lot more field grown food (or pasture) to feed an animal and then pass those calories on to you.
The complication is that, especially with a global economy, there are a lot more intermediary steps between growing something and you eating it than just for meat. Importing rare foods from other continents, then over the road to your city, with all of the preservation requirements, processing, etc., will result in a lot of carbon and environmental effects. Depending on the supply chain, a bowl of rice could end up being a significantly bigger environmental problem than a nice big steak. That is, if you got the steak locally and the cow it came from was pasture fed on otherwise unusable land, and the rice was processed and shipped from around the world.
I'm not sure how an average consumer could really calculate the environmental impact of their foods, but there would be a few shorthand things to consider.
1. How far did it have to travel to get to you?
2. How processed was it to make it palatable, keep it fresh, etc.?
3. How many steps between initial growth and your ability to consume it (eaten by animal, then by you, verses just eaten by you) and how efficient those steps are in terms of energy/calories.
I'm skeptical of vegans getting their B12 from supplements instead of meats, because that seems wholly unsustainable and ultimately worse for the environment than many meat-related options. If you would have to import your vital nutrients from countries all around the world, verses relatively local chickens, then I think that should be a consideration as well.
Travel matters, but not a lot. Most of the energy inputs for food happen when it's made at its creation point, by a 10:1 margin last I checked. We have a very good transportation system in the modern world.
A year's supply of B12https://nutrientsbest.com/products/vitamin-b12-2000-mcg/ shipped around the world is insignificant.
Now, I have *health doubts* about a pure vegetarian diet.
Yes, but to further complicate things - assume my charity budget is fixed. I donate x% of my income. Right now it goes all to givewell, but I could divert some of that to a carbon or chicken offset program. Now we have to include the opportunity cost of the human suffering by african children not having malaria nets, for example.
quick correction to your math in the second paragraph:
>switching from an all-chicken diet to an all-beef diet saves 60 chicken-equivalents per year.
by your own estimates, it should be (80 chickens - 0.5cows*20chickens/cow) = 70 chickens. Or another way of looking at it is that you would reduce the animal suffering cost by 7/8
that math error propagates down to all the other calculations, so the simplest way to make it all correct is to round up even farther to half a cow = 20 chickens.
BTW the EDF directly estimates the social cost of CO2 as $50 per ton, which is only 5x the offset cost, so the Yog thought experiment is not necessary. If the social cost were that disproportionate to the offset cost, it would be a lot easier to coordinate emission reductions among countries. If the social cost were e.g. 50x the offset cost, then a completely selfish country with over 1/50 of the world's GDP would still want to unilaterally decrease emissions regardless of what other countries do.
If we're trying to account for global warming/climate change, shouldn't you also be thinking about (1) the cost of feeding cows versus chickens (I'm not an expert but I think it's way more carbon intensive to feed cows, especially if you need to fertilize any pastures, and that's one of the biggest environmental reasons to avoid eating beef), and (2) a lot of modern farming involves transporting cattle between different locations depending on where they are in their lifecyles and there is a lot of CO2 emissions in moving them?
They don't emit methane and probably suffer less than chickens (correct me if I'm wrong). I personally weight the climate impact a lot higher than the animal suffering impact, so anything's better than a cow and pigs are better than chickens.
Well, I roasted a chicken yesterday and I'm thinking of boiling some beef tomorrow. I can't work out if I'm part of History's Greatest Monsters or Doing My Bit To Fight Carbon Emissions 😀
This is not a steak or a roasting joint, this is "boiling beef". What, you've never cooked anything with stewing beef? 😀🐄🥩 This is a very fancy recipe (I wouldn't use sugar or cloves, bay leaves depending on whether or not I have them, I would use onions, parsnips, maybe some turnips, whatever I have to hand, and stock with dried herbs and a dash of Worcester sauce plus seasoning) https://thescottishbutcher.com/recipes/boiled-beef-and-carrots/
Ah I see, it's a language issue. In the US that's called braising not boiling. To us, boiling involves much more water that is disposed of like how pasta is cooked.
Oh indeed, you wouldn't "boil" it, it's "simmer slowly". Other means would be stew (if using diced beef) or casserole it or pot-roast in oven. I prefer to do it on the cooker top as I was taught in my family 😀 You add cold water/stock, bring to the boil, then turn it down and simmer (depending on size of joint) for 1 1/2-2 hours (or more if needed). Doing it in the oven takes a little longer.
(a) This has made me hungry, I am *definitely* cooking that meat joint tomorrow and (b) I rather feel that exchanging recipes about "how to cook beef" is maybe not the right thing on a post about "cut down meat eating as much as possible, to none if you can" 😁
I assume you at least perform enough moral calculations over food to avoid cannibalism? Or maybe you're just lucky the supermarket doesn't carry long pig.
I reckon you could probably do pretty okay in life by outsourcing all your ethical decisions to the rest of society via the proxy of the law. If it's legal, do it. If it's not, then don't.
The law gives you a lower bound, but it's a pretty low bound. For the cliched example, there was slavery. If you knew slavery was wrong, you could do far better than the law, so why not? That magnitude of win would be well worth the moral calculus.
Yes, that would be. It's a lot clearer and less fussy than trying to calculate the differential between beef and chicken. Even "vegan or carnivore?" is a lot more clearcut and easier to figure out where you stand than this is.
What's the problem with doing moral calculations anyway? Is it the effort of the calculations themselves, or the risk of sacrificing more than you should by getting the calculations wrong?
The problem isn't necessarily with moral calculations, it's with moral calculations -over food-. The problems are the tremendous amount of effort and research required and the fuzzy and ambiguous results obtained, especially in combination. As this post amply demonstrates.
The general problem with doing moral calculations is that it tends to increase the risk of moral complacency. "I've *done* the calculations, I don't need to worry about the morality any more." It tends to lead to a discount of the possiblity that the assumptions underlying your calculating are wrong, in part via cognitive dissonance. Plus when you put numbers on things a lot of people seem to intuitively (but wrongly) assume the conclusions are a priori more certain.
Or in other words, sometimes there is a lot of value in saying "I don't know" when you don't actually know. Keeping the fact that you don't know front and center tends to make you more aware of subtle new information that might affect your viewpoint.
I'm not saying any *particular* moral calculation is wrong, or not worth doing (including this one). I'm only pointing out that moral calculation isn't risk-free, can have future moral costs of its own vice human nature.
the equivalent in vegetarianism to realising slavery is wrong and not engaging with or supporting it would be to realising factory farming is wrong and not engaging with or supporting it. if you do that, then there is no need to do any "fussy" calculations. and of course you could do these same kinds of calculations when engaging with slavery, too ("i am calculating that i should get native slaves instead of slaves imported from overseas due to the added suffering of displacement and transportation").
Agreed. In this case you do get to avoid these calculations by just going all the way and obstaining from meat entirely. You could come at that through some kind of moral calculation still (there's some economics involved in understanding that your purchases actually have consequences at farms) but it's a lot simpler.
Now I wonder if I can think of an actual example where tricky calculations really are the dividing line between committing an atrocity or not?
Slavery was about humans. The equivalent argument here would be that domestication of animals is enslavement. Even keeping pets is enslavement. That's a quite different question.
Would it be okay if we ate the flesh of a being that was adjudged never to have had human personhood and hte rights attached thereto (an aborted foetus, I've had the arguments over "this is only a *potential* person, it's not a human being yet" ad nauseam) or have lost personhood (persons in vegetative states where it's okay to pull the life support plug, people who have advanced dementia etc. where they expressed wish while still compos mentis, or their families on their behalf, or the hospital, judge or whomever wishes on their behalf, to carry out euthanasia)?
Because as I've said, I've seen all the debates about how humans aren't special, there is no such thing as a soul, where the mind is gone or never developed there is no longer such a thing as the human person there, just a lump of flesh, etc. So that should be uncontroversial to say we can consume this flesh, if properly treated, right?
People who are all "abortion is okay because it's only a foetus" and "euthanasia is okay because it's only a vegetable" do not get to dictate to me that "oh no, the poor cows who can have best friends! the poor cluck-clucks!" about what I'm cooking for dinnner.
I think you missed the intention of my comment, which was in response to "I don't have to perform those moral calculations. The law and society do it for me." My point is not that cannibalism is self-evidently wrong, my point (echoing Scott further up) is that cannibalism is an issue where almost everyone would make a personal moral calculation of *some* kind when forced to do so, even if they claim to be happy for "law and society" to make their rules their behalf.
Should law and society, in future, make eating the meat of non-human animals illegal, then that will indeed cause people to make personal moral calculations. I can see court cases over people continuing to hunt, or to raise food animals, or butcher them, or eat that meat. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
At the moment, eating people is wrong, eating cows and chickens is permitted.
You're not positing a situation of "forced to do so," like the Donner Party. You're just ignoring the "and society" part of my statement. The point is, in ordinary circumstances it doesn't come up. Extraordinary circumstances are a different question, and not the one you raised.
As far as moral concern goes, I think it's right to act your rational conviction, but I can't honestly surmount my own doubt that it makes sense to care about animal wellbeing. Animals are just a significant degree less interesting than humans. If I really am to say that chickens have moral worth, I don't see any easy spot to get off that train between chickens and insects. It annoys me when animal rights activists act like it's SO OBVIOUS to care about chickens but don't have an extremely OBVIOUS reason to ignore the potential moral worth of mosquitos or flies. The human race has deployed a gene-drive edited mosquito population in Florida to eradicate a particular kind of mosquito, we're literally doing very-intentionally-engineered genocide on some mosquitoes and while there are detractors of this scheme their criticism seems mostly centered on gene-drives being potentially dangerous and hard-to-control technology with unpredictable outcomes. As far as I've followed the issue, I haven't heard the perspective that we ought not genocide this population of mosquitoes because they have moral worth.
I can, however, contrive a reciprocity test. Which is that cattle are very kind creatures. Chickens are not. Pigs are not. Insects are not. You would not leave a young child in alone in a barn with chickens or pigs as you would be concerned that they would get eaten. You would not have the same concern with cows, apart from getting accidentally kicked or stepped on. I think this makes sense and is not-hypocritical. It's roughly the same logic we apply to humans under liberalism: as long as that human would not harm me, I have no right to harm it. But if we have evidence to believe that a given human WOULD likely bring harm to others, we lock them up.
I think a similar heuristic extends to animals reasonably well, and it leads me to eat chickens and not cows.
I agree mosquitos and flies probably have moral worth. It's probably very little moral worth, but enough that you shouldn't make billions of them suffer or something.
I don't mind animal death as much as animal suffering - my guess is that death is only bad insofar as you have a preference not to die, which animals aren't smart enough to do, but suffering is bad ipso facto. I am mildly concerned (though it's not the top thing on my mind) about insect suffering, and I know some charities working to replace painful pesticides with non painful ones, or stop the factory farming of insects. I support both those efforts.
Are cattle actually that kind? Don't they kick you if you get too close to them? Also, Huns aren't very kind, but I still wouldn't torture/kill/eat a Hun.
"Kind" is certainly not the perfect adjective for what I'm talking about. I mostly think that some form of reciprocity should be central to the heuristic. Cows have no history, that I'm aware of, of killing, enslaving, or displacing humans. Chickens don't either....but they would! This probably deserves some empirical evidence I am not qualified to give, but I get the sense that if chickens were large enough, they'd peck you down without a second thought. Cows are plenty large to bully us somewhat more than they do, and they don't. It is a well known rural fact that even slightly hungry pigs will eat even a human being alive, but cows will not even eat a dead person.
it seems unfair to the other animals to treat them differently based on how they act, for the simple reason that they are not aware of the reasons for their actions, and thus cannot choose to act differently -- they act instinctively. we also usually don't hold other people accountable when we feel they had no choice but to act a certain way, which is one reason why we treat mentally ill criminals differently, or why we don't judge wrongdoing children as harshly as we do adults.
Something about the offset pricing seems wrong. If it's true that the average American produces 17.5 tons of CO2 per and equivalent per year, and that a ton of carbon can be effectively offset for $10 per ton, then an average American could offset his entire carbon output for $175 per year? And the entire country's annual CO2 output could be offset for $58 billion per year?
That's objectively a lot of money... but also not that much. Before we consider economies of scale, it's about five times as big as the Pentagon's fuel bill. That's less than twice the Department of Energy's budget. But all this is orders of magnitude cheaper than the "Green New Deal."
If we set annual costs aside and look at renewable energy projects, this also doesn't seem to make sense. The Topaz Solar Farm costs $2.5 B to build and provides power to 160,000 homes. That's orders of magnitude more expensive. To be very conservative, assume a 5% rate of return to private capital, no operating costs, and that a third of an American's carbon emissions are due to home electricity.... you're still looking at a capital cost of $125 M per year to offset the emissions of 60,000 American households, or $1,000 per person offset in capital cost alone.
If the costs involved in offsetting carbon emissions were really so low, this wouldn't be a major geopolitical issue. You wouldn't need the US and China to agree to any climate treaty, or agree to do anything at all, the EU with its strong Green Parties could simply fix global warming by spending 1% of its GDP.
But that can't be right. Collective action problems can only exist when the costs of fixing the problem are higher than the harm to any individual actor.
If the costs really are this low, and Europe faces any noticeable harm from climate change, it would be economically rational for them to just fix the problem unilaterally. Forget the PR benefits, the fact that it would be overwhelmingly popular among European voters, the fact that they could force the world to chip in with relatively minor tariffs. The EU could simply solve the problem globally and save money at the same time.
....so why haven't they? They're strongly incentivized to, their voters are for it, they're spending roughly this much on foreign aid already. They could use their aid budget to save the planet and profit at the same time. For as much fun as we poke at the EU, if it was that simple, they would have done it. If only to spite Trump.
The costs for an individual may be $175 a year, but the problem doesn't necessarily scale cleanly. It seems evident that once the low-hanging-fruit ways of reducing carbon are picked, it starts to become more and more expensive to reduce carbon.
It's like buying stocks; just because you can buy the first stock for $X doesn't mean you can buy the millionth stock for $X.
But that's an argument against offsetting being useful at all. Or at least an argument against the prices being useful for making ethical or policy decisions.
If there's only a small number of $10/ton offsets available relative to global emissions, and future offsets sufficient to solve climate change will cost, on average, $100/ton, then the true cost of emitting carbon today is $100/ton. The price that matters is the average price necessary to solve the problem, not today's marginal cost that won't solve the problem.
I was going to say - Europe can't fix it unilaterally because we don't have industrial machines to suck carbon out of the air. But I think you mean paying the offset costs around the world? I think offset costs are still useful when they're marginal, but yes, for policy purposes you need to think about the total cost of solving climate change for your carbon price, which is probably a bare minimum of $50 a ton. So Europe *could* try to unliterally fix climate change, but a) it would cost bare minimum 10% of their GDP and c) it would cost more every year unless all the other countries actually stopped building carbon emitting infrastructure.
Yes, exactly. If the offsets available now are cheap but very limited in quantity, and the cost of offsets required to fix climate change are dramatically more expensive, then you shouldn't use today's prices for the cheap quantity-limited offsets to make moral calculations. You should use the order-of-magnitude-or-more prices of what it would actually cost to solve the problem.
Say you buy a coffee every day for $2 from your local diner, and have a "every tenth cup costs 1cent" card. If you have a fully-punched card in your pocket, yes this next cup will cost you one cent, much as there's no marginal impact whether you eat a particular piece of meat that's already been slaughtered and prepared. But when you consider the cost of going to the diner each day, when you're seeing if your habit is affordable or ethical or doing any type of analysis of this type, the marginal cost of each cup of coffee is $1.80, not 1 cent.
This logic always seems weird to me because if I choose not to order chicken at a restaurant or buy chicken at a grocery store, I'm not actually keeping a chicken from being eaten, I'm exerting extremely subtle market forces that have some small chance of leading fewer chickens to be raised for food in the future. This goes much more so for cows. I'm not sure how sensitive these markets are to differences in demand.
I think you can probably abstract this away - it's like voting, boycotting a company, not wasting water, donating to charity, etc. One person doing these things barely helps at all, but millions of people doing them helps a lot, and you can't have millions of people doing them without individuals doing them.
Something like 5% of Americans are vegetarian, and I do think this probably decreases the amount of meat produced by something like 5%.
That's fair, I was mostly responding to the line, "most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems. Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten." It seems like the abstracting is being applied in one case but not the other, though maybe this is unfair. It's certainly a minor point.
I do separately wonder how much slack there is in the meat market, though, since I assume a fair percentage of it is currently thrown away?
Page 5 of this report https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf asserts that "a fair percentage" is 22%. (50% for seafood, 52% for fruit and vegetables.) I don't know what that tells you about slack in the market, but this is at least a number to have where there previously were none.
How do you feel about keeping dogs and cats as pets? I have a large dog who eats several pounds of chicken and beef per day. The net meat consumption of my household is out of control, totally because of my dog.
I feel pretty hopeless about changing my own behavior, given that anything I do will hardly make a dent in my household meat consumption.
Does anyone know what fraction of meat consumption in the US comes from household pets?
The cows replaced the buffalo, who numbered around 50-60 million. There are currently around 94 millions cows in the U.S. .So, you could probably subtract the methane that would have been produced by the buffalo we exterminated from what is currently being produced by the cows to judge the actual impact of beef and dairy operations on climate change.
I think the actual cow vs. bison comparison isn't exactly the point. If we didn't eat cows, we probably wouldn't have millions of bison roaming around. Also, it's not really important to have exactly the same amount of carbon coming from each source - if we had neither cows nor bison, that would reduce some carbon and help compensate for us emitting a lot more from cars and coal and stuff.
I didn't know that -- thanks for the link! I wonder why bison produce less methane than cows? (I assume that dairy cows produce more methane than beef cows due to diet.) I also thought that this fact was quite interesting: "There are over 9 billion livestock (cattle, pigs, chickens turkeys, etc.)" in the U.S. That's a lot of critters in the CAFO chain....
I find referring to "adjusting for market failure" in this context to be rather odd. "Adjusting for market failure", to me, implies that the market price is a valid first-order approximation, and we're taking into account higher order effects. But climate change isn't priced into meat, and even less so is animal welfare. Calling it a "market failure" when you have a moral agenda that the market is ignoring is really stretching the term. Suppose you believed that using contraception is a moral evil, and you value each act of birth controlled sex at -$100. Clearly, that amount of money isn't priced into birth control pills. Is that a "market failure"? Or is that just the market ignoring your moral preferences?
I didn't mean a failure in the price of meat, I meant a failure in the price of offsets. It's still a weird term to use, but I think it makes sense at least analogically.
Low carbon investor here. My assumed social cost of carbon is more like $100 than $10 (off topic, but when I look at the studies that come up with a low cost, their scope is always way too narrow). However, I still prefer beef to chicken, for the animal welfare reasons you set out. Even better, there is an incredible interest among younger cattle raisers in sustainable and regenerative farming practices, and restoring lost carbon to the soil. There are business models emerging whereby you can make good money by adopting such practices. So I expect beef to start moving pretty dramatically towards zero carbon, or even carbon negative, within this decade.
A humanely raised free range chicken is still pretty good sometimes.
I don't understand the underlying assumption that you're responding to, stated but not really proven, that the price of a good (or the cost of an action) has anything to do with its moral value. There's a lot of work being done by this one sentence: "on the grounds that the market has priced its moral cost at lower than chicken's moral cost". What does this actually mean? The market hasn't priced a moral cost at all, and I'm not sure why that would be a default presumption.
In the carbon offset case, the price of an offset is driven by
1. The cost of producing it, eg setting up a biogas digester or hiring guards to make sure a rainforest doesn't get cut down.
2. What people/companies are willing to pay.
3. An incredible thicket of UN and national policy.
As I think another commenter has pointed out, there's a completely separate concept of the social cost of carbon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Estimates) for which a good estimate might be $100/ton. Unfortunately because this is an externality, and much of it is borne by future generations, there's no mechanism by which it gets incorporated into the demand for offsets and therefore their price, unless many people are actually altruistic and knowledgeable.
For animal welfare, it's even simpler: this isn't the "market price" of anything, it's just the cost of an intervention.
You go on to conclude, I think, that we shouldn't use these prices to determine the ethics of our actions when we don't offset because of "weird market failure" but again I'm not sure where the presumption comes from that a functioning market would set prices equal to the moral costs.
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A second point, and this may be nitpicking, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Nobody agrees on exactly how much it costs to offset a ton of carbon". There are many sellers of offsets and they all charge different prices! There are some legitimate ways to do it for $4/ton, and other legitimate ways to do it for $15/ton.
You do have to be a bit careful with those prices because the products are pretty different. On the one hand, some of them are perceived to be extremely low-quality (meet the certification but are unlikely to be doing much of anything). Some of them have "co-benefits": replacing coal plants improves air quality, protecting rainforest helps biodiversity. And also some of them are actually prices on the secondary market, where people are forecasting the "how much demand will there be fore these credits before they expire".
In any case I would agree that $10/ton is a fair placeholder value for the category.
I have the feeling this math only makes sense if you eat a wide variety of cuts of beef and chicken. If you only eat beef fillet, for example, you're responsible for killing a cow every single meal, granted that you are sharing that moral burden with everyone that eats the other cuts (and it will be a lot of people, sure).
The same can be said about eating chicken hearts, which are delicious, but I stopped eating them because just one small skewer with those are like 5-10 dead chickens worth for what can be considered a light snack.
That seems only true if those chickens wouldn't have otherwise died, though. My understanding is that the demand for hearts is vastly less than that of the demand for drumsticks or wings, which makes non-eaten chicken hearts mostly gone to waste.
If you stop eating the most heavily-demanded parts of chickens (breasts, wings, drumsticks) and eat more of other parts, that seems like it should result in fewer dead chickens overall, because you're not increasing the demand for more dead chickens.
I don't think either of these explanations is quite right. Because breasts, wings, drumsticks, thighs, hearts, and whatnot are available in fixed ratio, prices will adjust so the demand of all the bits is equal, and the most popular bits of chicken will end up being the most expensive, such that the demand for breasts ends up no higher than the demand for thighs. When you eat a particular part of a chicken (or cow), you make that part marginally more expensive, and every other part marginally cheaper, such that the market remains in equilibrium, and in practice you only increase the number of chickens/cows produced by a fraction determined by the ratio of the market value of the part you ate to the market value of the entire animal.
The only exception is if some part of the animal is so undesirable that it is being thrown out rather than sold at the margin. In that case, that part should be available for simply the cost of making it available for sale rather than disposing of it, and eating it should not result in any extra animals being slaughtered. I don't know if hearts are in that category. Either way, they are likely cheap enough that you don't need to feel any more guilty about eating five chicken hearts than you would about eating 1 chicken breast.
I took to eating chicken livers, based on recipes I got from the old blog, but they may have been giving me gout so I stopped.
And my reasoning was similar: if I am eating animals, eating the less-valued parts of the animal was moral. (And it was an incredibly cheap source of protein, right up there with the rare times a gallon of milk is on clearance for less than a buck.)
Things like offal (such as chicken hearts) are by-products, the chickens will be killed anyway and if you give up buying the hearts, that doesn't mean those chickens will now survive. If the chickens were being specially raised (as for Strasbourg goose specially fattened to produce pate de foie gras) it would be a different case, but as it is, the hearts/tripe/kidneys/liver/crubeens are the lesser cuts of the animal and it's no worse to buy those than the carcass or joints.
The crucial assumption here is that carbon-offsetting actually works in practice. Not surprisingly, a quick search reveals corporations claiming it does, and environmentalist websites claiming it doesn't. This study commissioned by the EU (https://ec.europa.eu/clima/index_en), sides with the environmentalists:
TLDR is that they found that 75% of supposed "offsetting" activities were "unlikely to have resulted in additional emissions reductions" in the sense that they were not "additional" and would have gone ahead anyway, and only 2% had "high" likelihood creating additional emissions reduction.
Dishing out money to charity instead of reducing your carbon footprint seems a lot like buying indulgences from the church -- if someone says you can do bad stuff as long as you pay them afterwards, you should probably be skeptical.
What bothers me is that the only scale of measurement is dollars--as if my throwing green paper at something actually solves anything. I know that we can do things with green paper, I just don't know that it can be used to solve moral and/or ethical problems.
Yeah, but chickens are our historical enemies, descended from dinosaurs, and they're nasty filthy vicious profoundly stupid creatures, so I'm totally OK with their suffering in the service of my appetite.
Of course, in the event it happens that I eat a vegan diet, for my own health. But I would be totally OK with eating chickens if I weren't. Nasty little creatures.
I think this thought experiment is missing the largest point. Cows have best friends, you can tell the difference between a 'happy' cow and a 'sad' cow. Cows can show affection. To my knowledge, chicken's show none of this. So you could say 1 cow consciousness is worth 1,000 chicken consciousness. Or even more than that if you'd like. For instance, almost no one puts moral weight on killing a fly. There seems to be a cutoff point in which something isn't conscious. Where are chicken's and cows on that spectrum? It's certainly not as easy as comparing the number of neurons.
Both the issues of climate impact and animal welfare vary significantly depending how the animals are raised.
Free range farm animals arguably suffer much less than most wild animals. Plentiful food for life then a quick painless death. One could potentially argue that it's a moral obligation to eat these animals to ensure more are brought into existence.
Cows raised on fresh pasture that are 100% grass-fed (or close to it) also have a much lower impact on climate change than feedlot cattle. They can also be raised on land that isn't suitable for crops, negating the argument that it's inefficient use of agricultural land.
The catch of course is that it's probably not possible to produce current levels of beef and chicken under these humane and sustainable conditions.
You're doing more harm than good here. There are plenty of cold hard facts we can use in order to make these decisions. By injecting sophistry like "consciousness scales with the number of neurons,"you're simply muddying the waters and casting doubt on whatever conclusions we draw.
Edit: "scales linearly" is the key thing I forgot to add. Obviously there is some relation but the idea it is linear is preposterous, and the idea that it has anything to do with a survey on people's intuitive judgements is even stupider.
If you disagree about the assumption about the neurons-consciousness-morality connection, you can just substitute in whatever moral value ratio you personally prefer. The article assumes that, roughly, saving 1 cow is equivalent to saving 20 chickens. If you believe 1 cow is actually worth 3 chickens, or worth 100 chickens, you can just alter the math to reach your own conclusions.
You can use "cold hard facts" for most of these calculations, but when it comes down to ethics, you have to rely on fuzzy and subjective beliefs about the value of those lives.
The market price of carbon reduction is so broken that if you buy a certificate to save 1 ton of CO2, a good approximation is that you safe 0 tons. I would argue strongly against basing any arguments on market prices for CO2 emissions.
How do you safe CO2 in this system? You ask the owner of a forest if he promises to not cut down the forest in the next 20 years. A "yes" is not legally binding, you hope that he feels morally obliged to stick to it. The carbon reduction price is the lowest amount of money that someone is willing to pay for a "Yes". If you have even one traitor then this price is ridiculously low. And note that buyers (think of an airline compensating their CO2) may have an incentive to encourage traitors.
I think this is exactly what happens. I don't even think there are mechanisms for preventing the owner to sell the same piece of forest over and over again, generating CO2 "reductions" out of the same forest many times. And then still change his mind a year later and cut down the forest. This are mechanisms against this in some countries, but as long as it works in some other countries, it will determine the market price.
Dedicated people try to have certificates of better practices. Those try to find out whether the owner is actually serious about it. So they ask "Are you REALLY SERIOUS about not cutting down the forest?", and if he still answers Yes, then he gets the money. Despite sounding cynical, I think this helps a bit.
There are also people (on the level of governments) trying to fix the system. Perhaps we will have a working system in 5 or 10 years. But currently, it is so completely broken that any money you pay now will likely have 0 returns. (There are reasons to use it nonetheless. You can speculate that using the system now makes companies get used to it, and that they can't easily withdraw when/if the system actually starts working.)
Is it true that farm animals are still given antibiotics as a matter of course to help them grow big? Can you put a dollar value on contributing to antibiotic resistance?
yes, though the main reason is probably to avoid disease, not to aid growth:
> Some antibiotics are given to cattle and pigs to marginally speed up their growth. The biological mechanisms through which antibiotics promote growth aren’t well understood, but the use of antibiotics to promote growth does seem to work. More importantly, raising animals in densely packed conditions requires a steady dose of antibiotics to prevent infections that would otherwise run rampant. [...] For more than a decade the European Union has banned antibiotics for growth promotion in farm animals, and tried to impose standards that increase animal welfare and reduce the need to use antibiotics. The US has begun to follow suit, driven by consumer demand for antibiotic-free meat, and FDA threats of regulation. But most developing countries are moving in the opposite direction, with explosive growth of antibiotic use in both people and animals in China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and many sub-Saharan African countries (Van Boeckel et al. 2015).
I think people are emotionally detached from farm animals vs pets and I think it would be useful to include common pets in these questionares as a sort of a control.
for example neurally and in terms of capacity for suffering and moral cost I'd expect pig or a cow to be as valuable as a dog, yet I suspect that most people that had no contact with farm animals disagree, as shown by the western outrage towards dog consumption elsewhere in the world.
What about donating to completely unrelated charities? E.g. you switch to eating beef only but instead of giving that $22 to carbon offsets, you give it to some charity, which you think does even more good. That way, you should come out net positive in the moral calculus.
I try to do a version of this (though I also try to eat less meat in general) and one of the main challenges in practice is knowing whether those $22 really are additional. If you were already giving to charity prior to making this commitment, then whatever sum you donate annually is sort of arbitrary. Say you donated $X last year and want to give a little more this year but haven't decided exactly how much yet. But you also want to offset your meat consumption this year, which is an additional $22. Whatever amount $Y you decide to donate this year, it's hard to tell whether you wouldn't have chosen the same $Y without the moral offsets. If you give to carbon offsets, that's a cleaner psychological separation. If you've made a Giving What We Can pledge or something similar, it's easier again.
It's kind of a stupid argument, because it's really just a psychological effect, but for the reasons Scott described above, it's important because offsetting really only works if you do the offsetting.
Still, I think giving to the absolute best charity (or a donor lottery or whatever) you can think of and using the carbon offsets as a lower bound of how much you should give is a good idea; at least if you're mostly utilitarian like me.
yeah, i've thought about this too. this seems related to kahneman's mental accounting theory. people generally account (financially, or morally) within a certain context, and prefer to be net positive within that context. of course a bunch of local optima don't necessarily add up to the global optimum. it could be that this is a good practice in practice, due to it increasing one's motivation to do good or something like that, but in theory, with rational agents, it should always be better to optimise the global, context-independent utility, as you point out.
If I've listened to a favourite album dozens of times on a streaming service, I feel some moral pressure to support the band by buying the album. But then I think, well, if I'm trying to act morally, I could do so much more good if instead of buying the album I sent the $10 to an EA charity. But sending $10 to Africa to buy mosquito nets because I like an album a lot feels completely bizarre (plus, as you point out, it gives me a psychological excuse to donate less later on). So I end up doing nothing. I still haven't really resolved this in my own mind.
Red meat like beef is considered more carcinogenic than white meat like chicken, I believe. So I have a huge selfish motive to eat less beef than chicken.
One could argue that consciousness actually scales *exponentially* with neuron number, since there is some network effect going on there. If that is the case, eating 0.5 cow is much worse than 80 chickens, morally speaking.
> We calculate it out and find that eating chicken only causes the equivalent of $1 in damage (since Yog Sothoth eats only one extra galaxy, and we can save one galaxy for a dollar). The implied moral is "Go ahead and eat chicken, it only does $1 worth of damage and that's not much". But actually, it causes an entire galaxy full of intelligent beings to die.
Your error is in assuming that $1 is the market price for a galaxy. That may or may not be the price of saving the marginal galaxy, but the market is obviously not clearing at that price: more galaxies would gladly pay $1 not to be eaten than are doing so. This construct can only exist temporarily, such as if the charity were not yet well-known.
To extend the example to your chicken-suffering-versus-beef-offsets, the problem is worse: you're not valuing the direct value of the benefits. You're finding a value about how much other people would altruistically pay to stop a harm that (especially in the case of the chicken) does not directly affect them. To put it cinematically, "your money or your life" has a different weight than "your money or *his* life."
Now, assuming all of these offset programs are above-board, you as an individual can balance the moral scales (in some sense) by in fact making the offsets. In that case, you're comparing like against like, and you're at a Pareto optimum: neither the rate of chicken suffering nor the carbon content of the atmosphere would increase.
In using altrusim prices to make the argument, however, you are no longer operating in a Pareto framework. Something will be made worse for your actions. And those market prices do not reflect the real value of mitigation or the subjective value to the victims, but the altruistic value to third parties. Don't be a status-eater.
> Second, most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems.
This is not in fact true. As far as we can tell, the human cost of climate change is increasing on the margin. The incremental harm of going from 4 to 4.1 degrees of warming is much worse than the harm of going from 2 to 2.1 degrees of warming.
If you think that your emissions would not be replaced on the margin, then reducing them is *more* beneficial if you think that the world will not effectively coordinate. The bigger trouble is in evaluating whether emissions will be replaced, since if you are making this decision in a market framework (e.g., taking an unnecessary drive and filling up the gas tank as a result) then prices will change causing others to change their behaviours.
I'll note that carbon offsets do not yet have this problem, since for now the area appears to be demand-constrained with little offset-price-effect on the margin.
Ascertaining whether emissions will be replaced at the margin is indeed non-trivial. I note that many commenters here tend to assume that personally reducing emissions is likely to, on-average, make no difference, because The Market will do its damnedest to price signal at someone else to buy it. (see comments addressing this through demand elasticity at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2092992 and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2092664 ) Other effects are conceivable: As a good becomes less consumed it may achieve fewer economies of scale; as a good becomes less fashionable it may be consumed less. Higher order effects are also conceivable, if unlikely; e.g. as a good becomes less fashionable, state actors may be more willing to reduce subsidies and tax concessions to the companies that produce it, or increase regulation, and thereby increase the cost further. Marginal contribution to any of these effects is tricky to estimate.
Slightly related, the question of whether marginal consumption effects are even comparable between chickens suffering and carbon(-equivalent) emissions. This thing:
>Second, most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems. Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten.
I get a lot of this in discussion. I disagree, I think these two types of harms avoided are qualitatively similar in the marginal effects of personaly, but this might reflect my personal assumptions about the distribution of outcomes, which are tail-risk sensitive.
More concretely, the effect of changes in marginal chicken consumption I think we tend to model as a low-ish variance negative-mean increment in the total amount of chickens killed. The effects of emissions reduction could be something like that, or the total expected effect could be dominated by the tails of the effect distribution, if we imagine low-probability but large effects such as successful state coordination could be influenced by consumption choices. Or, more plausibly, it could be a mixture of these two types of effects
I think if you care about specific quantiles of these effect distributions, they could seem qualitatively different, but my instinct is to think about them both through something like the expected (in the sense of mean) suffering incurred, in which case the marginal effect looks similar in kind. I think Scott's argument that they are different makes more sense in the light of, say, median, rather than mean, suffering incurred, under the additional assumption that the expected increment has mean zero because elasticity. Recommended edit if this is correct would be something like
>anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all, with respect to the median outcome, (although it might effect the mean)
I don't at all understand why the relationship of consciousness to cortical neuron count is assumed to be linear. My prior would be that it is anything but. A network of ten neurons can assuredly not be conscious in any meaningful sense, no matter how you adjust the connection weights. Saying that ten billion such isolated systems have the same consciousness measure as an adult human seems obviously silly.
The Gödel Escher Bach approach of relating consciousness to self-modeling would also suggest this. Some threshold of neural complexity needs to be passed for such modeling to become a realistic possibility. It’s not going to be a discontinuous jump in the “consciousness function”, but it might be a sigmoid-like curve. The question then becomes: What is the slope of that sigmoid? Where on the neuron count scale is the mid point located?
I have no idea. But I don’t think you can just assume chickens and cows are both on the slope, rather than stuck at “basically 0” or “basically 1”. Let alone that they’re both on the slope, and it’s shallow enough that you can just fit a linear function to it.
With our current limited knowledge of consciousness, I don’t think there’s a good answer to this. But where I’d start is looking at actual animal intelligence experiments, rather than neuron count, and try to figure out a likelihood ratio between chickens being conscious and cows being conscious from that.
I’m far from an expert on animal intelligence, but I was under the impression that cows tend to perform far more impressively. A likelihood ratio of 1000+ in favour of the cow doesn’t seem totally ridiculous to me. Which would tilt the math to eating chicken being better.
Interestingly, while this discussion is about chickens and cattle, where you can make some pretty decent arguments about suffering either way, the case where it seems absolutely clear-cut would be swine vs. cattle. Not only do the pigs weigh less, they're _also_ more cognitively advanced and presumably more capable of suffering.
So if you want to go on a meet selection crusade, definitely start by getting rid of pork - that's the no-brainer under this line of argument.
One further (albeit a bit complicated) argument in favour of chicken over beef: it's the best choice in the possible states of the world that are most unfavourable to meat-eating, so the best response to uncertainty.
TL,DR; the beef over chicken policy is the best idea in worlds where the differences in moral value between different animals are smaller, which is also the world where the difference in moral value between humans and other animals is smaller, which is the world where animal lives matter the most.
Longer:
Dan Dennett, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Descartes could be right that moral value more or less 0 below the point where first person experience occurs and a constant value above it, and first person experience isn't very common in animals - so Chimps, Dolphins, babies past a certain age all matter about the same and no other animals do. In which case, eat whatever you want.
OTOH, Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer could be right that first-person experience isn't the key thing and in fact it's capacity to feel and react to pain that matters, in which case there's a sliding scale of moral value that we can scale with neuron count or something similar, such that a Human doesn't matter millions of times more than a chicken, but maybe only tens to thousands of times more, so there are no sharp declines of moral value with brain complexity.
What's key is that between these two, is a VERY wide range of possibilities. We basically know that human lives matter most, and the question is how the curve looks 'behind' us - does it drop off almost straight away after Chimps or decline completely smoothly, reaching near 0 only at sea sponges and nematode worms?
So there a range of graphs over hugely different orders of magnitude, all the way from a completely flat increase of moral value where the most and least complex animal life aren't all that different (so my life only matters 10 times more than an insect) to a very hard 'exponential' increase where my life, or a chimps, matters a million times more than a dog. Not all of these are equally plausible, but the best argument for caring about animal lives is that considering how horrible factory farming is, most plausible settings of the numbers that aren't just 'animal lives don't matter at all' say it's a bad idea, and it's not that plausible that animal lives don't matter at all.
Here's the bit that's relevant to chickens vs cows - the more carnivore-friendly models of the world are ones where animal lives matter much less than humans - these are ALSO ones where there's a much steeper drop-off past humans because the moral value of animal lives depends on much more sensitively on brain complexity.
In a world where a cow's life matters 1000x more than a Chicken's life, so the climate maths doesn't work out in favour of eating beef over chicken, it's probably also true that a cow's life matters >1000x less than a human life, and so eating meat isn't much of a big deal in general.
Whereas if you think that a Cow's life matters only 2x as much as a chicken's, so the climate maths works out well for eating beef over chicken, that's probably a world where the decline in moral value with capacity to feel pain/brain complexity is much flatter IN GENERAL, so eating meat is morally much worse in general.
I shall explore this somewhat further when I am not also working, but I do wonder if there is a role for a component that honestly weighs heavy in the decisions I make about what to eat:
Is the animal a jerk?
Chickens? Jerks. They'll peck each other to death and stomp on the corpses.
Young male lambs? Jerks. My godfather takes a shovel in with him when dealing with his ram so he can hit it in the head. The ram ignores anything less, and is quite aggressive.
Steers? Often dicks, though not always.
Pigs? Not necessarily dicks. In fact, can be downright pleasant.
I think, all else being equal, it is definitely better to eat nasty animals that are mean to others than to eat ones that are nice and pleasant to all other creatures. Though on another level, should we let the nice ones have a brief, pleasant existence before we eat them?
maybe part of the reason factory farmed chicken exhibit anti-social behaviour is because they are packed insanely tight and live their whole lives under a lot of stress? factory farmed pigs also exhibit anti-social behaviour, by the way, including biting each other's tails off, which is why their tails are often docked without anesthesia (so they don't get wounds that might then get infected -- it hurts profits).
is your point that chicken "deserve it" because some of them do these things? because if not, your eating factory-farmed chicken will lead to there being more chicken in crowded factory farms, which means there will be more anti-social behaviour, and therefore more suffering, both for the anti-social chicken and for their victims.
Most of what you call ‘anti-social’ behaviour in chickens isn’t something created by factory farm conditions.
I keep chickens and they live a care-free free range existence (until I cut their heads off) and they are quite capable of pecking each other to death. Sibling on sibling, mother to daughter - they don’t care....
Having said that, there’s always a reason- usually an injury. Or because there are too many cocks for the number of chickens.
On a more general note, it doesn’t make much sense to me to talk about the suffering of chickens or cows. Unless of course you choose to buy them factory-farmed in which case your moral compass is already quite squiffy..
No trouble. I'm not referring to factory farmed chickens, though. While ours were not free range, they had a large coop with attached outdoor area which did not allow things to eat them. They were still nasty little jerks who would on occasion peck each other to death. As Anteros said, they don't care. Honestly, the behaviour of chickens is one of the things that makes me willing to believe dinosaurs turned into birds.
I despise battery cages. Unnecessary cruelty is bad. But chickens can be pretty cruel themselves, and so letting them lead a reasonably comfortable life then eating them seems somehow more OK to me than eating a nicer animal. The same goes for geese, as an aside. Not sure about ducks, but given the behaviour of other poultry I assume they are jerks until someone shows me otherwise.
I think it's largely because it makes me feel less empathy for them than I would for a nicer, cuddlier, kinder animal. Then again, I'm not sure that's not as good a reason as being worried about the QALYs of cows vs chickens. It's probably more quantifiable.
yeah, i see your argument, though i think it's flawed. specifically, i don't think it makes sense to judge non-human animals at all based on how they behave, or at the very least not to treat them better or worse depending on how they behave, for the simple reason that they have no choice to behave the way they do -- unlike humans, they are not aware of the reasons for their actions, and cannot choose differently. so it seems unfair to chicken to blame them for acting the way they do, for the same reason that we are more lenient to severely mentally ill criminals or misbehaving children.
If they're unthinking creatures of instinct with no control over their actions, it doesn't seem to matter much if we eat them, as long as we do so in a minimally cruel way. We're basically eating a machine.
Also, while I never noticed much personality in chickens, almost all other animals I've dealt with (or known people who deal with) have at least some amount of disposition. There are mean ones and nice ones. Any animal aware enough to be trained is aware enough to control its actions to at least some extent.
> If they're unthinking creatures of instinct with no control over their actions, it doesn't seem to matter much if we eat them, as long as we do so in a minimally cruel way. We're basically eating a machine.
matter to whom? surely it matters to the animal we are killing? if you think that animals, like machines, are not at all sentient or aware, then that is our crux.
> Any animal aware enough to be trained is aware enough to control its actions to at least some extent.
i don't think this is the animal being aware of the reasons for their actions, i think they are still only responding to stimuli, only it has learned to respond differently to those stimuli through positive or negative reinforcement.
How can something be said to matter to them if they're just collections of unthinking instinct with no control over their actions? That's like saying my eye cares if you poke it and it reflexively shuts.
As to being aware of the reason for their actions, I've definitely seen my dog consciously choose to ignore me. He is also a jerk, though I will not eat him.
> Honestly, the behaviour of chickens is one of the things that makes me willing to believe dinosaurs turned into birds.
Complete tangent here, but dinosaurs were just animals, not terrifying fantasy monsters. We've got no reason to assume that they would be any more or less aggressive than modern animals.
The reasoning seems spurious to me. Chicken, cattle and pork make up a huge proportion of the animal biomass on the planet specifically because they are bred for food:
Chicken make up 3x the biomass of all wild birds combined, and cattle make up almost twice the biomass of humans and 14x more than all wild mammals combined.
You can't "save" chicken by offsetting, because there is no wild population of chicken to save, and if there were, it would not be in anywhere near the volume needed for effective offsetting. So unless we start devoting even more space for chicken or cattle as ornamental pets (presumably at a cost orders of magnitude higher than battery-farmed chicken or cattle), the supply of offset credits would simply limit to a tiny elite of virtue-signaling rich people.
The point as I understand it is not to "save" chickens by instead allowing them comfortable existences, but to "save" them from terrible existences followed by being eaten. At some level of suffering, existence is presumably worse than nonexistence, so having fewer suffering chickens would be better.
This applies less to animals whose lives aren't so unpleasant that they're a net moral loss, but the premise is that on the whole, factory-farmed animals' lives are worse than nonexistence. For chickens at least, it's hard for me to see that not being the case.
So how does this offset work? Pay someone else not to eat chicken? I can't stand chicken anyway, so sign me up for some free money for not doing something I would not do anyway! I'll spend it on beef steaks.
My best understanding is that it's an estimate based on the impact of outreach attempting to influence people's dietary decisions (promoting reducetarianism, vegetarianism, etc.) on people's actual food consumption, per dollar invested into outreach. So if you spend a few hundred dollars trying to persuade people not to eat chicken, that may save a few chickens over the course of the year, aggregated over all the people the messaging reached.
Personally, I'm extremely skeptical of treating this sort of intervention as a moral offset. First, because it seems unlikely to scale well; if a bunch of people start putting out messaging to convince people to reduce meat consumption, pretty soon they'll persuade all the people who constitute low-hanging fruit, and the costs to persuade anyone else will go way up. And second, because, well... it kind of seems like a direct investment into hypocrisy, in a way that buying carbon offsets doesn't. You're basically paying for the propagation of an argument that doesn't persuade you to modify your behavior, in the hopes that it will persuade other people to change theirs so that you don't have to.
Pricing carbon offsets into meat could be generalized across the whole market to make the industry carbon-neutral. It'd make the meat considerably more expensive, because the meat industry produces enough CO2 that it'd probably exhaust the lower-hanging fruit for carbon offsets and drive up the price of those a lot, but it's certainly doable in principle. Generalize this across enough industries, and at some point, rather than paying for reduction of CO2 generation somewhere else, you're paying for increase in carbon sequestration.
Pricing outreach for reduction of chicken consumption, or the consumption of any meat, into the cost of the product, fundamentally doesn't make sense in the same way. It's ultimately self-defeating.
The above is a training video from the Australian cattle industry about how to humanely process cattle for slaughter. It is worth a watch. Obviously, includes a stungun firing a bolt into a cow's head, and a cow getting it's throat cut.
Having watched it, I am fairly confident that the cow likely doesn't know what's going on and is dead quickly and humanely. I wouldn't want to work in a slaughterhouse, but if you made me watch the slaughter of every animal I eat I probably could.
I would suggest it for people. I definitely learned something about myself watching it.
Well of course the training video is going to portray things going cleanly and neatly. In reality it seems failures do often occur - as shown by the video's casualness when it comes to the matter of restunning!
No one would think of using a training video to prove how safe a workplace was in reality - why do it in a situation where workers have significiantly less incentive to follow the rules?
By the same logic, "of course" videos by people trying to show people the meat industry is inhumane will show things in the worst possible light. This is the inverse of that to at least some extent. At the same time, it's clearly straightforward enough to do that I am prepared to believe claims that the failure rate is low.
As to having significantly less incentive to follow the rules: what advantage do slaughterhouse workers gain by NOT killing cattle quickly and humanely? Getting covered in blood and listening to terrified lowing, followed by having to deal with a bunch of panicky multi-ton animals is not a fun time.
Also, which step are they going to skip? Not restrain the cow? Good luck. Not stun the cow? Good luck. Not cut the cow's throat? Seems tricky to kill it most other ways.
Also also, your argument that we can't trust the training video because failures are common seems rather contradicted by your immediately following comment that we can tell this because the video is casual about one of the kinds of failure.
"By the same logic, "of course" videos by people trying to show people the meat industry is inhumane will show things in the worst possible light. This is the inverse of that to at least some extent."
I don't see what that has to do with anything. One source being biased does not mean that you can blindly believe sources that are biased in the opposite direction.
"At the same time, it's clearly straightforward enough to do that I am prepared to believe claims that the failure rate is low."
A 2013 study of a Swedish slaughterhouse found that 12.5% of cattle were inadequately stunned, and they quote other studies that cite similar figures. Around 5% of cattle showed SQR3 symptoms after the first stun - the most serious category of stun failure. These numbers get higher if the slaughterhouse does not use head restraints, which is still common.
"Also, which step are they going to skip?"
Steps that probably do not directly affect their safety and are primarily to make the killing process more humane. From watching the video, the following would seem to fall into that category:
-Using minimum coercion to move cattle
-Not forcing cattle into the restraining device or leaving them trapped in it
-Fully checking that the cattle is unconscious after stunning
-Fully checking that the cattle is dead before beginning meat processing
And, of course, people break workplace rules designed to protect themselves all the time...
"Also also, your argument that we can't trust the training video because failures are common seems rather contradicted by your immediately following comment that we can tell this because the video is casual about one of the kinds of failure."
I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here.
"I don't see what that has to do with anything. One source being biased does not mean that you can blindly believe sources that are biased in the opposite direction."
First, it doesn't mean the level of bias is equivalent. Second, if you want an idea of what happens in slaughterhouses those are more or less the two options. This seems likely to be more accurate than videos designed to convince people slaughterhouses are awful, since it is an industry training video posted on Youtube rather than a video designed specifically to convince people of the evils of an industry.
The Swedish study you mention (assuming I found the same one - it is not good form to not cite sources properly) also notes that the solution to inadequate stunning was to stun them again in some cases. Y'know, that thing the video shows. It is not clear from what I can find what percentage were inadequately stunned, or exactly what that means, how it was handled, and whether restunning worked.
I note that you have not explained what, in fact, the slaughterhouse employees get out of slaughtering large potentially dangerous animals ineffectively. This is an important component - yes, it is possible to skip smaller steps. It is still very much in the slaughterman's interest to make sure the large potentially dangerous animal is dead to the world before trying to stick a knife in it.
"I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here."
You are claiming we can't trust the training video to be honest about mistakes being possible...because mistakes are included in the training video. This is contradictory.
"since it is an industry training video posted on Youtube rather than a video designed specifically to convince people of the evils of an industry."
It's an English dub of a training video intended for Vietnamese workers, posted on a YouTube channel made to promote Australian farming. PR was evidently a concern.
"also notes that the solution to inadequate stunning was to stun them again in some cases. Y'know, that thing the video shows."
I don't see what that's got to do with anything. The point is that not every cow dies quickly and humanely.
"It is not clear from what I can find what percentage were inadequately stunned"
12.5%, the number I gave you that is also in the abstract.
"or exactly what that means, how it was handled, and whether restunning worked."
The paper gives full details.
"I note that you have not explained what, in fact, the slaughterhouse employees get out of slaughtering large potentially dangerous animals ineffectively."
Speed. As you admit, some steps are only "effective" in that they improve animal welfare. And even when there are safety concerns, to deny that people break the rules in the interests of saving time and effort is ignorance in the extreme.
"You are claiming we can't trust the training video to be honest about mistakes being possible...because mistakes are included in the training video. This is contradictory."
I never said the training video was lying about the possibility of mistakes. I meant that it is weak evidence in proving that following the procedures is the norm and not following them the aberration.
"I don't see what that's got to do with anything. The point is that not every cow dies quickly and humanely."
...Because a re-stunned cow still can ultimately end up being stunned?
"12.5%, the number I gave you that is also in the abstract."
Since my previous comment was not sufficiently straightforward enough for you: either provide a link to what you are using, or pike off. Seriously. I can find references to it by googling, including copies of the abstract, but not the full text. The abstract is not sufficiently clear about several of the things being measured for me to be sure exactly what the measurements mean, and I'm not debating further about your interpretation of something you are not sharing.
"Speed. As you admit, some steps are only "effective" in that they improve animal welfare. And even when there are safety concerns, to deny that people break the rules in the interests of saving time and effort is ignorance in the extreme."
You keep glossing past the bit that an inadequately stunned animal is a dangerous animal. A cow can absolutely kill a man. A spasming, poorly stunned, angry or panicky cow could or maim several. While I am not suggesting that slaughterhouses are perfect, your apparent claim that normal practice is to be careless of animal welfare is not apparently justified by the study you are referring to or by common sense.
I am aware that the US meat packing industry routinely wrecks things in defiance of common sense. All kinds of US industries routinely wreck things in defiance of common sense. This does not invalidate industry, except possibly by Americans. But there is a difference between the question "is slaughtering of animals acceptable at all" and "is slaughtering of animals meeting the standards we have set." The video answers the first question fairly well, in my view.
"I never said the training video was lying about the possibility of mistakes. I meant that it is weak evidence in proving that following the procedures is the norm and not following them the aberration."
A quote: Well of course the training video is going to portray things going cleanly and neatly. In reality it seems failures do often occur...
That's you. You do realize that the things you've previously said remain visible, right?
This problem reminds me a lot of Alasdair MacIntyre's critque of 19th Century Utilitarianism in _After Virtue_ Ch. 6 "Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project". Somewhat more than most things, it's probably a bad idea to jump into the middle of that without knowing the context within the larger argument and work itself (Utilitarianism isn't even the focus of the book). But, to throw in a piece anyway: "For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier. / To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes... it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.(MacIntyre - After Virtue, Third Edition, Ch. 6, p.64)
One I always wonder about with this kind of domestic animal problem though: what's the proposed alternative for these particular animals that are not getting eaten? In the short term, I suppose a bunch could just be set free into the wild. Maybe at least some of them would survive for a while in a sufficiently abundant area, maybe there would even be some feral herds that linger. I'm doubtful there would be the same number of said animals in existence in the long run though, and if that is the case, the question is was avoiding suffering so paramount that existence existence or at least life should be forgone? Perhaps we could consider that all the matter that made the chicken or the cow would still exist, and from one view that's equivalent, but then it's hard to figure out why that set of atoms existing as dirt or suffering as a plant rather than as a chicken is particularly better. That's not to say we shouldn't care about suffering, but I think there's a lot more questions to be asked and answered on this kind of problem, and perhaps the framework needs to be scrutinized more.
I haven't heard mention of that book in 35 years, what a remarkable hoot from the past.
There is certainly a problem of polymorphism. For Carl Lewis, 10 years of deprivation (of a normal life) + umpty hours of grueling physical training + 10 seconds of winning Olympic gold >> 0. For most other people, the same sums up to << 0. And we can go on and on. How are we *ever* to be able to add up sums like these in any general way? There seems almost no metric that applies across the board to everyone. You can't even say everyone prefers life to death, as there are many cases in which people demonstrate by their actions that they value certain outcomes more than their own life.
We could be like the economists, and just wave it all away by saying we all have "utility functions" and we take those as a given, and by measuring everyone's "utility" we have a transformation black box that takes actions and turns them into measures of utility, and then we can price all the actions, do the sum, and arrive at a system of ethics.
But perhaps those utility functions are *so* complex, and even so time and situationally dependent -- change with time, experience, social pressure, and even philosophical introspection -- that we end up reduced to more or less defining them as "whatever people want," either what they say they want or what we infer they want through revealed preference.
Which alas threatens to reduce the utilitarian calculus to collective hedonism: we should all do what feels the best, collectively. The greatest orgasm for the greatest number, so to speak. Which is sort of aesthetically discouraging, and moreover leaves no room for logos.
It looks like nobody has brought up the huge issue with these offset numbers, which is that "saving X chickens" actually means "convincing people to eat X less chickens". This of course has significant costs to those people.
Offsetters are simply shifting the burden of vegetarianism, plus adding the costs of charity operation (including targets watching depressing/disturbing videos).
Offsets only work if you actually consider ALL effects of the charity, not just the metrics they advertise.
What surprises me the most is how cheap it actually is to offset for Co2 emissions... I really like internal combustion engine cars, and I dream about one day owning a really cool ICE car, and if this is the price I have to pay to offset the effects of Co2 emissions I don't even see how it ever became an issue.
At least in part, the low cost of CO2 offsets is due to there being a lot of low hanging fruit. If everyone suddenly got serious about offsetting CO2 I expect that price to go up by a lot.
What I like most about his post is that it has always bothered me that we have religions that won't eat pork or beef but none, so far as I know, that won't specifically avoid chicken. Could this be the birth of one?
The chicken vrs beef question is an interesting one, but in view a less important one than the standard vrs organic/free range one for the reason that I would think that more people will be inclined to switch to organic rather than choose exclusively chicken or beef
Central to the standard vrs free run benefit / cost analysis are two key considerations: 1) Do animals have "standing" in calculations over welfare and 2) The challenges in quantifying suffering and utility generally
Assuming you agree that animals have standing, then the next question is do some animals have more standing than others and if so, how do you determine these weights (as Scott identifies).
Cost and purchasing power also come into it, as arguably there is more moral imperative for someone who is wealthy to switch to free run, than someone on low income.
If you care about the suffering of, say, cows, why? Are they your mother?
Some people don’t care at all about the suffering of others. These people are generally called psychopaths. If you are solipsist, it’s logical to be a psychopath. If others don’t exist except in your imagination, you should use them as you wilt.
If you are not a psychopath and care about the suffering of other humans, or even other animals, or even vegetables, why? It’s probably because you view them as other beings, like yourself. You empathize, or at least sympathize with these other beings.
Why do you care about the suffering of other beings? It’s because you consider yourself a being, right? You care about them because they are in the fraternity of beings, a club which you belong to.
What makes you both beings? You experience shit. Who experiences shit? You do. And they do.
Now, are you separate entities, you and the chickens? It’s all semantics from here down, but my macro view is beings are these things made of matter and the entity must exist within the matter. Seems more likely matter itself has qualia than that it’s an emergent quality, because it's a simpler explanation.
Scaling moral worth by (cerebral cortex) neuron count seems like a poor measure to me. By that line of reasoning we'll have to conclude whales are worth as much as a human, using Wiki's data. Orcas are worth 3 humans.
That's without getting into the fact that a lot of things are determined by neuronal connections rather than neuron count. Should we determine moral worth using the number of synapses in the cerebral cortex instead?
Scott, I think a more interesting thread might include a definition of suffering and some down-the-rabbit-hole speculation on why avoiding is preferable. It seems to me that vegans and other holier-than-thou types are striving for a kind of purity that cannot exist in the context of natural life. I mean, let's face it, if you want to minimize the suffering of animals you should develop the skill of marksmanship and become a big game hunter who only takes head shots. Wild animals don't have retirement communities. They either die of starvation (or freeze to death, or bleed out) or they get eaten (often eaten alive) by predators.
I believe that natural life is, at least in large part, suffering. Anyone who denies suffering is actually denying life in the natural world. Sorry vegans, but that combine harvesting the mega monocrop is chopping up everything from terrified fawns to snakes and birds.
People should embrace suffering. We're all gonna die anyway.
From these considerations, really by far the most important thing <a href="https://www.unz.com/akarlin/animals/">is to just avoid pork</a>. Or get probably a OOM-tier reduction in cognition-adjusted animal suffering by going pescetarian.
PS. Personally I mostly consume chicken and turkey as animal protein.
Shouldn't these calculations take into account wild animal deaths? There are diffuse causes that are hard to pin down, like global warming, pollution, and land converted for growing feed, but cattle ranchers kill a lot of things directly (wolves, bears, mountain lions, snakes), sometimes in really unpleasant ways (prairie dogs). Ugh and all the deer etc that get tangled in barbed wire. I guess it's grimly nice that there is less wild animal suffering per beef produced as rangeland is defaunated.
I appreciate the reasoning, if you're reluctant to eat creatures, and some of them are one meal, and others are thousands of meals... the math is pretty stark.
Maybe pilot whales are the result of a timeless evolutionary process, where they adopt decoy cneurons to defend against time-traveling rationalists who prefer whale meat over insect-based protein.
Cheap jokes aside, I do worry about moral weights scaling cleanly with cneurons. And this is something I've worried about for a long time.
In fairness, I'm also very worried I'm getting this wrong, given the amount of cycles you've spent on this too. I absolutely clicked through to read all the times you've previously discussed it, and find the surveys fascinating and challenging.
So I want to say pretty cautiously, I think I have an idea why the surveys come out that way, while not being particularly normative. But I'm still committed to thinking about this in more detail.
I'll list a few problem areas, then a possible explanation for why those emerge, and a few alternatives (none of which are particularly satisfying, but might prompt someone smarter than me to move the ball further forward.)
My initial concern is that the cneuron:moral weight analysis produces weird results at the margins. Does a whale's worth of mosquitos have any moral weight at all? Is there a Jupiter sized swarm of (galactic space faring) mosquitos we should sacrifice humanity for?
For digital intelligence, is suspending a process on my CPU similar in kind, but just not degree, to ending an AI with agency, identity, goals, a way to contextualize its own history?
Then at the other extreme, how much more moral worth does a post-singularity paperclip maximizer hold over you and me?
The extremes are relevant, because when we're talking about animals at 1-2% of our cneurons, then we are already at some intuition breaking extremes. People report feeling moral responsibility towards robots that so much as mimic human facial expressions, with the processing power of a toy. People generally feel more moral responsibility towards "cute" animals relative to "ugly" animals. They aren't great at surveys of moral weight at extremes.
I also worry about this for close comparisons. Do smarter humans hold greater moral weight than others? I can imagine lifeboat ethics situations where intelligence is the most important skill to ensure the survival of the greatest number. But as a universal principle? I can imagine somewhat more fanciful scenarios where the best person at growing soybeans, juggling chainsaws, or mixing strong drinks that appease angry aliens are the most critical to everyone's survival.
Are we sure we want to put down that dogs are *roughly twice* as morally valuable as cats, even though there's enough ambiguity in that *factor of two* difference that owners can still endlessly debate relative intelligence?
So close comparisons and extreme marginal cases both pose some problems. Yet a clear scale seems to emerge in surveys, and track our rough intuitions, with more confidence on one end.
What could cause that?
Maybe the scale is right, but there are just hard cases. A lot of hard cases clustered in those domains.
Another natural way to get those results, and those same problems, is to have a sorites paradox about a binary condition. Any bright line feels arbitrary, so you get a smooth-ish distribution in polls, with more certainty at the ends. But you're still measuring essentially a binary (or at least a very steep) condition.
To break a sorites paradox you need to think carefully about what constitutes that threshold. (Or bite the bullet and go with an arbitrary line). You'll still get probabilistic arguments near that threshold, and that's fine, but it will allow you to consider a much narrower range than "anything with any processing power whatsoever."
If reducing the firing of nociceptors is your main overriding concern, if pain signals buttress your entire morality, then ok, nevermind, this doesn't need any touch ups.
But maybe harm reduction is "mostly right," in the way that Newton was "mostly right." And now we're at the end of the paradigm runway, where new models that provide additional resolution are necessary (while sure, preserving most of the previous results).
Imagine a weird lab that ran current through isolated nociceptors. Great tragedy or no? If not, why not?
I'd propose that neurons in petri dishes have no moral weight because of larger factors, like, (a) they can't contextualize pain, or, less likely (b) they aren't part of a moral community that can engage in exchanges of moral behavior, or, Sam Harris's (c) they don't contribute to the flourishing of humanity, or, the more Stross-ian (d) they are unlikely to contribute meaningfully to maxing out the instructions per second per gram in our galaxy. A proxy for (d) might be likelihood the species' descendants will experiment with genomic editing or interplanetary travel.
None of those are problem-free, I'll admit. But any of them provides a framework you can extend to build a cutoff that falls short of humans and isn't completely speciesest, providing opportunities for promising high intelligence species like corvids, but without going all the way down the chain. This is useful if you do not believe that mere sentience, plus sufficient mass, becomes more important than sapience.
But maybe I'm wrong, and should alter my consumption based on the p() of confidence in this counterargument, which isn't stupendously high...
My personal intuition is that there is a cut off-- like chicken suffering doesnt matter 1/6 as much as cow suffering it just doesnt matter, because for suffering to matter you have to reach the complexity of a dog, I think in retrospect i mostly just wanted to eat chicken though.
I won't say the 'suffering of chickens vs cows' question is worth *nothing* but if I'm being honest I think the ecological impact question trumps the suffering question by a ratio so large we can safely round it up to infinity.
Trying to gauge the moral gravity of fewer numbers of relatively larger beasts vs greater numbers of simpler beasts (and let us note in passing that none of them are ever going to feel grief, or write histories; and their slaughter-as-opposed-to-living-out-their-lives-naturally will not leave any lasting impact on the world whatsoever) seems like exactly the kind of question a philosopher might pose as a reductio of utilitarianism because *obviously* it has no answer.
There’s also another benefit though not all of us will see it that way. Eating a lot of red meat could result in earlier mortality, reducing social security and Medicare costs to the government.
I just love your style m8. It doesn't matter wrong or no. That's besides the point. The themes you write on a hard per se to get right. But your style of writing is nice and good and funny in a non-funny way. Glad I have your blog to make my day!
The best ratio is the bony-eared assfish.
I'm arriving at this comments section late and seeing this line out of context is hilarious.
Glad you enjoyed it! In case you're wondering, that's the actual name for a fish, and it has the smallest brain for its body size of any vertebrate.
I thought it was something like that, thanks for the context!
I mean, I agree, sort of? But this is just not a realistic scalable solution. There aren't that many deer. I say that as someone who is trying (so far unsuccessfully) to learn to hunt without the benefit of family/social knowledge. I certainly plan to replace as much meat as I can with venison, but I think that, in the context of this discussion, it's lack of scalability makes it not very realistic.
I think there are different levels of compromise - vegan -> vegetarian -> person who offsets all their meat -> person who eats beef instead of chicken -> person who purchases ethically raised meat -> person who doesn't do anything. People at level n will always think the people at level n-1 are barbarians, and people at level n+1 are "contorting their diet to reach squeaky-clean moral cleanliness" - I don't think it's possible to escape either concern. My priority here is to make achieving whatever level of moral contribution you're going for as easy/effective as possible, so that a given level of effort can produce better results.
Also, my guess is that casually mentioning the existence of higher-commitment ways to do morality makes people more likely to do lower-commitment ways. A lot of people I know are vegan, and I don't think I could be vegan, but constantly being around them has shamed me into inconsistent pescetarianism. If I can make someone who currently does nothing get to the point where they eat ethically raised meat, I'll consider that a victory.
(though I'm also concerned about this because companies are really good at saying "We have ethically raised meat!" while making as few concessions to actually raising the meat ethically as possible, and you've got to be a real expert to navigate this space, whereas just not eating chicken is hard to get wrong)
I'm concerned that "cage free" could be a lie, but so could lots of things at the grocery store. At some point I have to trust the people doing oversight.
The raising of meat is also a lot more legible than carbon offsets. Someone can, in theory, inspect to make sure that chickens destined to live outside of a cage really are outside of a cage.
No. I speak as someone who's eaten everything from bugs in ChangMai to whale meat in Osaka. I especially have no problem with eating animals that have eaten other animals,
For the ethical vegetarians here, would animals having some amount of consciousness change your mind about animals that eat other animals that had consciousness?
I am an animal, by definition, with consciousness. If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster).
If animals have consciousness, and just like me they have consciousness at various levels on a spectrum, then they take their place in the spectrum of moral and evolutionary choices, just like me. Hence, I'm no better than they are, and as an omnivore my dietary choices are my own, including the animals I raise for food (some ant species farm aphids, so the natural world has allegories).
If on the other hand they don't have consciousness, and I do, and an argument can be made that my humanness puts me outside of the animal spectrum of moral or evolutionary choices, than none of this matters. They are animals and I'm a human and my moral choices regarding them doesn't register at all morally.
I'm either an animal, or I'm not, or I'm both. And in all cases my dietary choices fall into one of two morality spectrums that equally justify a dietary choice to eat other animals.
Well, in option 1, it's only OK to rape non-human animals. In option 2, I'm not sure.
"I don't have the mastery of ethics to eloquently argue this..."
Whether you think you do or don't really is moot because, quite frankly, I don't think of dietary choices as an ethical issue. OTHER PEOPLE make it an ethical issue. For the vast majority of people it isn't, which makes arguing about it 'ethically' difficult and filled with crevasses and pitfalls as those other people try to convince someone with common sense that their berkshire hog exists in the same moral spectrum as their great-grandma Kathleen.
Like I said, for the overwhelming majority of people, this isn't an ethical issue at all.
> If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster).
The project of creating/adopting a moral framework isn't just the replication of whatever behaviors we see in the natural world; it's an attempt to actively modify the world by examining what principles create what we think of as "good" in the world then living/acting according to those principles.
"Animals also do this so I get to" is an extremely poor justifying moral principle in that it could be used to justify nearly any behavior -- eating your children, eating your parents, raping whomever, beating/killing rivals to maximize your sexual chances, etc etc. I assume you don't do all of these things as well and would find most of them morally repugnant, so I assume this framework doesn't guide most of your moral decision-making. Why do you use this principle/framework ("animals do it so I get to") it in this case but not others?
You may have failed to notice that I didn't say which one of the morality spectrums I ascribe to. The above was merely a thought experiment to demonstrate the fundamental logic that BOTH morality spectrums justify a human's decision to eat other animals. And they do.
Your personal beliefs are not particularly relevant to the question of whether "animals get to do this, so I do too" is a good moral principle to follow under any particular framework. If it was a thought experiment, continue to consider it one, and use it to actually engage with the points I brought up in the previous post re what morality is for, what it does, and that someone following this principle would also find themselves morally justified in any of the behaviors I mentioned.
Where did you get the idea that there are two and only two "morality spectrums"? You seem to be defining morality in a different way than many of us.
"If whales have consciousness and get to consume hundreds of millions of tons yearly of invertebrates (also with consciousness) than so do I (I like lobster)."
I'm not sure where this "get to" is coming from. Are you saying that someone has certified that whales are doing everything morally right, and therefore if you do things no better than whales do, then you are therefore also morally right?
I would say that, morally speaking, it's better if conscious beings have better experiences, and beings with preferences get more of their more important preferences satisfied. Tornadoes, forest fires, whales, and humans all sometimes do things that get in the way of this. Sometimes, us trying to stop the bad things ends up making things better, but sometimes it makes things worth. So just because I'm not out trying to stop tornadoes and stop whales doesn't mean I think it's bad to try to talk to a human to talk them into changing their behavior.
This is just another instance of the same thing we see that some bad behaviors are illegal, while other bad behaviors aren't, because actively trying to punish people for some bad behaviors is helpful, while actively trying to punish people for other bad behaviors often makes things worse.
"certified whales are morally right"
Only other whales can do that. In every pod of whales one of the whales is designated as a certified whale morals certifier. Think of it like Iran's morality police, but in whale form. The Cetacean Certification Policewhale (CCP for short) signifies if another whale's actions are moral with one WOO if moral and a double WOO-WOO if immoral.
According to the CCP central statistics office, whales are generally quite moral, except for the southern Arctic and Pacific pods. Those whales are very immoral and have sex outside their pods and bully sharks and sea lions. But the Hawaiian whales are the most immoral of all. So bad they had to come up with a triple WOO-WOO-WOO, which is whale for "so bad they're going to whale hell". Steer clear of the Hawaiian whales, they kill for sport and sell drugs to cuttlefish.
Wait, so is the CCP a suprapod agency, with its certified whale morals certifier implanted within the pods to observe and report back to the CCP?
> If animals have consciousness, and just like me they have consciousness at various levels on a spectrum, then they take their place in the spectrum of moral and evolutionary choices, just like me. Hence, I'm no better than they are
I don't see how this follows. Murederous psychopaths are roughly on the same point in the consciousness spectrum, yet it seems undeniable that most people are morally better than murderous psychopaths.
Animals eat other animals and that is moral and utilitarian behavior. I am an animal. My eating animals is also a moral and utilitarian behavior.
You're merely asserting that they're moral. I've read some of your other posts here and it doesn't seem like you think you need to justify calling something moral, but I don't see why that's true. Why should I accept your claims if you refuse to or cannot justify them?
Since humans eat other animals, does that make them fair game too?
Yes. The prohibition against cannibalism is primarily cultural (with a strong evolutionary case for disease prevention as well). I would never eat another human, but others have and some probably still do.
Depends on how. If they were simply eating my cadaver, then yes. If someone was attempting to kill me to eat me, well they can certainly try (they'll need a lot of luck and fashionable body armor).
In both cases the moral prohibition is simply cultural: natural circumstances the revulsion against cannibalism, unnatural circumstances the revulsion against murder.
I have no problem being in the food chain. I'm in it now. So you are you. All of us are. I also have no problem being at the top of the food chain. I feel no shame.
Wait a minute, it's a circle. Bacteria have just as much right to claim they're at the "top" of the food chain as you do. Maybe more, since they eat *everything* eventually.
In severe famines, yes. In conditions of extreme deprivation, killing a stranger to feed him/her to yourself, and especially your family and your children, becomes an extremely moral act.
You can expect the other guy to kill you to feed you to his kids too. Both sides are acting morally; this is a conflict of interest.
You can see how utility scales with distance and situation by seeing how people react when you put one of their loved ones in front of the trolley problem, and then their friends, and then their countrymen, while putting other things on the other fork.
Please keep in mind that there's a difference between killing an animal and subjecting them to hundreds/thousands of hours of pain and suffering. Are they conscious of being in pain? Yes. Are they conscious of suffering? Yes.
Even if this were true, and I'm very dubious of this, I'm not sure pain morally obliges me to stop eating meat. How and in what way does empathy oblige me morally to care?
Just out of curiosity, which sources of morality do you find legitimate?
The kind that involve the creatures that came up with the concept. Humans. Not the kind that anthropomorphically applies that concept to creatures that don't understand it in any context outside a disney movie. Animals.
So, what about a proto-human. Something not smart enough to have a real system of ethics, but are on the cusp of evolving to be. How many generations away from that would you need to consider them a being deserving of empathy? What if there was some chance it would grow up to be capable of ethical reasoning? would 5% chance be enough? 50%? I have further discussion on this, but in the interest of not making a “gotchya” argument, I personally view babies on about the moral level of someone’s pet dog, so I’m interested if I can argue you into this position
Proto-human? You mean...like a fetus? Whoa....let's slow down...way down...we don't want to tread into that territory of things "on the cusp of evolving to be." All sorts of uncomfortable questions suddenly pop up like 'where is the cusp' or 'evolving to be' what?
Let's use dolphins instead. Maybe dolphins will someday have their own civilization in like 5-10 million years. At that point I'm willing to consider not eating them. Till then they're fair game.
i can see how being able to come up with a concept of morality and to think morally is relevant in deciding who is a moral agent, but i cannot see how it is relevant in determining who has moral standing. what is it about being able to act morally that makes it matter how we treat a creature?
"moral standing"
So you're implying humans have more "moral standing" than animals? If that's what you're implying then you're proving one of my morality spectrums. The spectrum that allows us the ability to use animals how we want and to use them how we want morally.
I'm a Confucian, so Common Sense is a good place to start. Oh, and you need to get a functioning, prosperous, strong society at the end of it.
I think this is one of the few posts I have seen on this site that has genuinely shocked me. I hope that you are arguing this in the hypothetical. Pain is a readily recognisable 'bad', and should not be knowingly imposed on others that will suffer from it for no reason. The species of the 'others' is of no consequence. Empathy is not the issue. Quality of life is.
Besides the "depth" of consciousness, there is another consideration: How often the consciousness is "on". I believe there's pretty widespread agreement humans aren't conscious when they are asleep for instance, but personally, I'm not at all convinced all humans are conscious every moment of wakefulness. Since consciousness can only be observed through introspection ("am I conscious? seems like I am"), is there evidence that humans are conscious outside of their most reflective moments?
All of this is so difficult and muddled I can't claim a high subjective probability, but I have difficulty fitting what-we-call-consciousness (which I can confirm as a real phenomenon through introspection, but don't know if it has all or even many of the properties philosophers tend to assign to the concept) in my reductionist worldview as something else than consequence of self-referentiality in a sufficiently complex system, and consequently, I wouldn't expect my consciousness to be there unless I am thinking about whether I am conscious. Furthermore, it seems that human brain asleep almost never passes whatever it takes for consciousness to emerge, which to me tentatively suggests the threshold for it to happen is pretty high, and for what it's worth, waking up from intense concentration/flow subjectively feels similar to when I'm drifting in and out of sleep.
Due to all the complications and uncertainties, my subjective probability for this one model is low (<10%), but I consider it more likely than any other individual model that goes into same amount of detail, and consequently I tentatively operate under belief that all humans are only rarely what-we-call-conscious, some humans (such as children) are probably never conscious, and that there is a good chance that no species outside Homo has ever possessed what-we-call-consciousness.
Of course, when it comes to attempts to calculate utility, you ought to factor in all other possibilities, many of which include non-human animal consciousness, even that it is very widespread, and that their experience is MORE vivid than that of humans (possibly due to humans having greater ability to inhibit their emotions).
But when a human is being tortured, how much of the time would you estimate they are suffering?
In the same kind of sense how plants or mechanical automata we are almost certain aren't conscious can react to stimulus analogous to pain, all the time. That seems uncontroversial.
Other than that, I'm not at all sure (just like I'm not at all sure humans aren't conscious during most moments of wakefulness). I would perhaps expect torture to repeatedly jolt the pain and awareness of your miserable situation you're in to center of the brain's attention, which ought to result in conscious experience, not unlike how I've thought about my own experience when I'm completely absorbed in something (those moments where you metaphorically and perhaps actually don't even notice the passage of time) up until I perhaps miss a step and hurt myself a little and notice I definitely am conscious and in pain, but on the other hand, I know there are lots of hurts I've been able to tune out of eventually even when cause persists. Presumably, torture methods tend to be torture not only because of the intensity of the pain but partly because they are the most difficult to tune out of, so, operating under this model, I would perhaps expect the tortured to be conscious a lot of the time, more than people usually are.
This seems very plausible to me. But it also makes me suspect that "consciousness" isn't really the morally significant thing. Preference satisfaction is good, and preference frustration is bad, whether or not someone is conscious of having it. It's better for a parent if they think their kid has died but the kid is actually living a fruitful life, than if they think their kid is living a fruitful life but the kid has actually died - even though the parent will have happier consciousness in the latter case than the former.
i wrote a dialogue in the old style about this exact problem (do we have duties to lifeless objects?), which you may be interested in reading. as a taster, here is one of the epigraph quotes:
> Thales, according to Herodotus, Duris, and Democritus, was the son of Examyas and Cleobulina, and belonged to the Thelidae, the noblest Phoenician descendants of Cadmus and Agenor. […] Aristotle and Hippias say that he attributed souls even to inanimate objects, arguing from the magnet and from amber.
>
> – Diogenes Laertius
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/auderico/
My thought is that somehow we have to settle how strong various preferences are, in order to determine how important it is to satisfy them. (For instance, my desire to live is stronger than the desire of the homophobe that I die, so at least on those two fronts, it is better for me to live.) My though is that however this works out, in order for a Roomba to have preferences that amount to even a small fraction of those of a chicken, it would have to be much more complex and lifelike than it actually is. But this is very much something that isn't yet worked out, and could conceivably go very weird, as you suggest.
> It's better for a parent if they think their kid has died but the kid is actually living a fruitful life, than if they think their kid is living a fruitful life but the kid has actually died - even though the parent will have happier consciousness in the latter case than the former.
well, it's better _for the child_ if the child is living, but i think it's better _for the parent_ if they think their kid is living even if that is false. of course it's much more important for the child to be alive than it is for the parent to think their child is alive, so it shakes out similarly anyway.
I think if you ask any parent about this, they would say that it is better *for them* if their child lives and they have a false belief about it, than the other way around. They care about how their child is actually doing more than they care about their own experience of it.
yes, on second thought i think you are right.
How could consciousness be on a spectrum? I mean, if we take as a crude operational definition "consciousness" = "being self-aware" how could you be, say, 20% or 4% self-aware? Seems like you either are or you're not, full stop.
How would I know? So far as I know, I have always been self-aware, because by definition I am not aware of any time when I was not. How could I be? So the question cannot be answered from the inside.
One might attempt to infer an answer from the outside, meaning someone else could try to decide whether I was experiencing self-awareness by examining the evidence of how I look and act. That is a notoriously difficult problem, as for example the problem of comas, "locked-in" states, and badly brain-damaged people (or the cognitive development of children) demonstrates.
But that would not demonstrate the spectrum at all, because *first* you need to write down a definition of "20% self-aware" that can be compared to the evidence. It's that point I'm challenging. I'd like to hear a good definition of "20% self-aware" before I admit it's any less illogical than "20% pregnant".
Have you ever been so tired that you can't maintain coherent thought and even though you are awake and observing your surroundings, you miss multiple details regarding the world around you? Like really obvious things like "who is in the room with me" or "what was I doing just now?" Or perhaps you have been drunk or high to the extent that you barely feel anything. What if an animal lived its life in a fog similar to these states, with no moments of higher thinking/observation/reasoning. Would they still be "equally self aware" as a human in a yes/no spectrum?
To me the answer seems obvious that consciousness is a spectrum.
If the OP meant "higher thinking" = clever and accurate reasoning, rich spectrum of thought, emotional vibrancy -- they he should have said so. But none of that is subsumed under "consciousness." In all of the states you describe, consciousness (meaning self-awareness) exists. I cannot think of situations in which a person is *not* self-aware (being asleep, or in a coma, or under anesthesia, or arguably with certain kinds of brain injury), and I can think of situatiosn in which a person *is* self-aware, but I cannot think of a single example in which a person is 20% self-aware. None of your examples fits, because none of them involve *self*-awareness -- they are all about being aware of the environment, or having a strong or more nuanced interaction with it.
Indeed, I would say the variation in awareness of the environment of which you speak can easily be ascribed to *non* self-aware organisms. A pine tree or single-celled organism can be attuned to it surroundings better or worse, can react to them functionally or not, and at different levels of complexity depends on its internal state (e.g. sick or healthy).
Sorry, typo: "I *can* think of situations in which a person is *not* self-aware..."
Yes.
I think they're sentient/conscious. I imagine something like a dreamlike blur of sensations for chickens and about half-awake-human level for a pig.
FTR I eat meat, but minimize consumption. The cow/chicken mass thing had occurred to me too.
I would put a pig's level of self awareness much higher than that. They are more self-aware than the average dog, and have both the ability to see into the future and plan, and also - I believe - a demonstrable sense of humour. If more people got to know pigs personally, no one would eat pork.
It is one of life's great tragedies that pigs are so tasty. If they tasted terrible, we would most certainly be keeping more of them as companion animals. They are somewhat parrot-like in their appetite for companionship, physical pleasure, and pure mischief.
I don't have anything of substance to add, but your description made me chuckle. :)
I dunno. I saw a chicken run the base pads on a little baseball game for two bits at a tourist trap in Rapid City SD. Let’s see a cow do that!
Don't forget that chicken that lived (and acted pretty normal) for years after it had most of its brain chopped off.
Yeah, a chicken's main evolutionary advantage is that they're so delicious this planet's apex predator will defend them from all comers.
Werner Herzog's take on this is spot-on. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhMo4WlBmGM
I raised chickens for years and came to the opposite conclusion. And they have noticable individual personalities. They seemed to be getting a kick out of life. Now ducks, they are stupid.
I strongly concur. I've also had a lot to do with chickens and I believe them to both have individual personalities, and also to be superbly well equipped to be outstanding at all the things that chickens need to do to live good lives and make more chickens.
Chickens approach the problems of life with zest and vigour.
They do, however tend to suffer from the same problem that sheep do - the bigger the flock/herd, the lower the (apparent) collective IQ. So people will rarely - if ever - see them express their full potential in the huge agglomerations that factory farming demands.
Apologies for giving a very serious answer to a fun comment, but before taking this line of reasoning very seriously, consider how it sounds applied to humans with severe mental handicaps. They have very low IQ, but that doesn't necessarily mean they suffer much less than a higher-IQ person (caviat: I have no expertise in neuroscience or anything like that).
The point being, I think I prefer lines of reasoning centered around physical measurements such as neuron count or connectedness, rather than the perception of intelligence manifested by the organism, since I don't think we have a strong intuition for how behavior maps to neural complexity or internal states.
That, and being 10x as smart as a rock doesn't mean your moral value is only 10x that of a rock.
Is there any actual evidence that individual voting changes affect which candidates get elected?
Isn't that the implicit premise of Scott's blog in general? Of trying to convince or inform anyone of anything? Of, I don't know, waking up instead of not?
There's a chance that nihilism is "correct" but it's absolutely certain that it's a total bore
Another perspective might be that these utilitarian exercises feel like a Rube Goldberg machine of rumination on the unknowable.
That's fair. But I'd argue that any sort of rumination - any attempt to examine the costs, measure them, compare them, and then make an informed decision consistent with one's values - leaves the individual (and, in the case of someone like Scott, the individual's audience) more aware of the consequences of their actions. Surely we agree that that's just an absolute good?
Consider this: what if, say, all ASX readers scale back their chicken consumption, reducing domestic demand, which in turn lowers prices for chicken, and the result is merely that more chicken is eaten in developing countries like China, because its price relative to alternative protein sources has fallen?
A similar line of thinking is frequently deployed to argue that the US shouldn't do anything to reduce its carbon emissions. It's nonsensical there and it's nonsensical here. We can't control what China does, but we can control what we do, and we have a responsibility to exercise that control in service of a better world.
More broadly, this kind of "what if far-fetched second-order consequence X?" thinking is a terrible way to make decisions because a) it's impossible to prove that consequence X won't happen and b) the supply of potential consequences is infinite. If you go down that road you'll never do anything.
I don't see it as non-sensical at all. If one is going to engage in some kind of self-deprivation in order to achieve a desired outcome, but the actions of others preclude our desired outcome, then asking whether self-deprivation is really worth continuing is a perfectly logical question. I think of it as similar to the whole fossil fuel divestment movement: there was no way a bunch of college kids were going to crimp Exxon's profits by getting their university endowment funds to dump the stock; there were too many other willing buyers for it.
As to your second paragraph, the interactions of supply and demand are hardly far-fetched! Think again!
There are a couple ways to answer this.
The first is that it's impossible to know what the actions of others will be, and whether or not those actions would preclude the desired outcome, but we do know that our desired outcome will never be achieved if we just keep perpetuating the status quo. (You'd have to change your behavior at *some* point, or you'd risk being the last person keeping the factory chicken farms going.) This certainty gap tips the balance in favor of action.
The second is that if we want to begin to influence the behavior of others, taking the action we want them to take ourselves first is a prerequisite. No one's going to listen to utilitarian arguments for vegetarianism coming from someone who's housing a KFC Double Down.
Finally - are you *sure* the fossil fuel divestment movement hasn't accomplished its aims? Exxon's stock is down 32% over the last 5 years, while the S&P500 is up almost exactly 100%. An activist hedge fund (Engine No. 1) just successfully convinced shareholders, over Exxon's objections, to appoint at least 2 new renewables/energy transition-focused directors to the board (which has 12 seats IIRC). Was this the direct result of some college kids staging some sit-ins? Impossible to say. But aren't you glad you live in a world where they did something, rather than nothing?
Your ability to influence the behavior of others is highly limited. It'd be foolish not to recognize this is the case.
As for that last part, yes we can be sure. Exxon is effectively a victim of it's own success. Thanks mostly to new extraction methods like fracking and tar sands boiling (or whatever they call it) US oil production soared over the past decade, driving prices down. See here:
https://www.macrotrends.net/2562/us-crude-oil-production-historical-chart
The college kiddies had nothing to do with it.
Not really germane to your point, but I happen to be an Exxon/Mobil stockholder, and have followed the stock closely for years. My opinion is that the current price of XOM slightly underrepresents its real value. The stock has traded for most of this decade at a P/E of about 10-15, which is conservative and normal. The company had negative earnings this year, but the expectation for next year is that P/E will be back around 10-15. Solid stuff.
The behaviour of the S&P 500 over the last 10 years, however, is absurd, having risen from a P/E of about 15 to its current level of about 45. That is delusional.
I don't think divestment has much power to reduce stock price. There's plenty of money controlled by people willing to move it into undervalued stocks regardless of ethical concerns.
At least from a deontological point of view, it's rather bizarre to argue that it's okay to perform an act if someone else would have done it. Is it okay to rob a jewelry store if someone else would have if you hadn't? A few hundred years ago, would you have accepted the defense "If I didn't do it, someone else would" from a slave trader?
Im always conflicted from taking this position and taking the every long trip begins with 1 step.
Like isn''t what you said true about most political movements, even the ones that suceeded?
It is all about likely consequences.
I dont think its absurd, but the "correct" answer, in my view, is the U.S.A curbing its meat consumption is likely to encourge China to curb its meat consumption at least a little and, is a problem that can be worked on concurrently.
I agree with arpanet's other points, but as a more direct response: from what I know about Econ 101 For Dummies, a reduce in demand shouldn't result in a supply increase outside of unusual scenarios. If a bunch of people decide to buy N units less of chicken, then yes, the price of chicken will fall to compensate, incentivizing more people to buy it. However, if you do the Econ 101 math, assume your supply and demand curves are mostly linear, and assume that your chickens are spherical, the net change will still lower the quantity of chickens supplied. You'd need a pretty unusual supply curve (concave up) to get a net increase in production.
Perhaps there could be some unexpected nth order effect where if the price of chicken falls and the demand for it overseas rises, it'll cause some sort of feedback loop in the popularity of chicken, resulting in a supply increase in the long run. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, though, I think it's best to default to the position that chicken (+other animal products) is an ordinary good that follows the usual rules of supply and demand.
If fewer people buy chicken, the economics will move to a different point in the supply-demand curve. If there is less demand, there will be less supply (dead chickens). Others consuming more in response to a lower price is not going to result in a total cancellation of that effect.
That would make sense if the supply of chicken was somehow fixed (e.g. if production were extremely difficult to scale down). I don't see any reason why that would be the case. When supply can go down, lower demand will make it go down.
If the price of chicken falls, farmers will instead grow cows.
Is that a 'lump of meat' fallacy I ask myself.
Farming supply-demand equilibrium will shift, there will be less meat farming.
"Lump of meat" is reasonable if the argument is _switching_ from chicken to beef.
But also, Scott argues that even this mere switch is a good thing, so that's okay.
You're just describing the Jevons Paradox.
Good to know, thanks.
I don't see how.
If it's a "safe" district, then for all practical purposes no. If it's a "swing" district, then your chances of being the deciding vote are actually similar to what they'd be if the election was decided by picking a single random ballot. (Yes, wins by one ballot are rare, but only as rare as you'd expect given the sizes of electorates. They've happened in significant elections before.)
My point is that many of us know that our individual votes don't matter, for all practical purposes, and yet we do it anyway, because it's an action that's consistent with our values.
I'm replying that "my individual vote doesn't matter" is genuinely false for a close-looking election! *Probably* it won't come down to one vote, but in an N-vote election whose polls put a tie within the margin of error, there's more than a 1/N chance that it will in fact come down to one vote. I can go into the Central Limit Theorem if you really want to dispute this.
(And if you're like "but recounts and legal battles", the same marginal reasoning also applies to whether, and how soon, recounts or legal battles get resolved.)
Sure, people often *think* it doesn't matter. But that's different.
Ok, I got you. I think we're agreeing from different directions.
The vote percentages have to be very close, or the number of voters small. If there are a million voters and one candidate has a one percent advantage, the probability of a tie is miniscule.
This is one of the common misconceptions: you don't come into Election Day knowing what the vote percentages will be.
It isn't flipping a 51% coin a million times and then adding one. It's flipping a coin a million times when your prior evidence only says that its weight is somewhere from 48% to 52%, and then adding one.
The negligible leverage from the worlds in which the weight is not very near 50-50 are countered by the high leverage in the worlds where the weight is very near 50-50.
I always look at it like a Newcomb problem. I need all of the people who think like me to show up to the polls. I think my personal decision will be reflexively consistent with the group. Therefor I need to go to the polls.
> because it's an action that's consistent with our values.
Not really, it's coordination. If I go vote, that means people with thought processes / beliefs / values closest to mine will also be more likely to go vote. If I don't, that means they're not likely to go either.
IMO spreading awareness of superrationality would fix a lot of stuff.
It is obviously true. Any attempt to prove it would require assuming facts that are obviously true to a similar degree.
Norcross (https://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/readings/norcross.pdf, starting on pg. 232) argues two things:
1. Say there is some load reduction of 10,000 less people per year that the poultry industry is sensitive to, and your cutting out of the consumption of chicken has a 1/10,000 probability of being being the reduction that hits the cutoff. Norcross says it's still sensible, as although the chance of individual action itself is the tipping point, the harm reduction is quite large. He akins this to us wearing seatbelts in cars and having oxygen masks and safety vests on airplanes. The small risk of great harm still outweighs whatever cost it takes to implement these policies.
2. Contributing your reduction of chicken consumption reduces the amount of time it will take to hit the critical load of 10,000 that will cause an industry response to downscale poultry production.
The 10,000 value is arbitrary, but there is some value N where this occurs.
But the background fluctuation is independent of your moral choice to not eat chicken, right? So I'm not sure why the extra noise would change the sign or the magnitude of your impact.
I _think_ the premise is more like "My hypothesis is that the noise present in the background fluctuation of annual meat consumption completely swamps any individuals' contribution".
you may be interested in this blog post that i wrote a while back: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/two-inadequate-arguments-against-moral-vegetarianism/
That makes no sense. I expect the background rate of murder to fluctuate, but that doesn't mean that me killing someone doesn't increase the number of people murdered. And in terms of autantonym's characterization of your argument, the number of murders "completely swamps" my individual contribution. This seems like a combination of "everybody's doing it" and "shoplifting is a victimless crime, like punching someone in the dark".
This seems like a really good point. The original statement "Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten," is highly misleading. Your choice to eat chicken or not is *not* a choice about whether some chickens get to live happy lives instead of being slaughtered for food. Instead, in the long-run equilibrium, the actual choice is whether the chickens are alive *at all* in the first place.
(The answer to your question about "individual dietary changes" is simply ordinary marginal economics. On the margin, a drop in demand will cause a drop in supply.)
If demand for chickens rises, then chicken farmers will breed and raise more of them. If demand falls, then fewer chickens will live. The actual choice you need to make is whether it is better for a chicken to exist at all (and then be slaughtered for food) -- or else never exist in the first place. There is *no* outcome where you get a large supply of happy free-range chickens that die of old age.
Maybe you'd rather there never be any chickens at all, than that they exist in factory farmed conditions. That's a plausible position, but I didn't see it discussed in the original post.
> There is *no* outcome where you get a large supply of happy free-range chickens that die of old age.
There could be - there's no reason why we can't pay for raising lots of happy free-range chicken - but I'm doubtful that enough people care about it.
Yes, and we should also consider breeding millions of homo sapient replicants to slave away on the outer planets. Because clearly, not breeding them would be a moral hazard in itself.
The mere addition paradox is a serious issue in ethical philosophy. I find your sarcastic dismissal of someone bring up relevant points inappropriately rude.
My comment does point to a serious analogous application of the base logic. The sarcasm in my comment is indeed rude. I take back the sarcasm, but I'd like to keep the comment please.
Are you familiar with the phrase "mere addition paradox" or "repugnant conclusion"? https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/repugnant-conclusion/ This is a well-known concept, especially in this community. Both Don Geddis' and your comment are retreading this ground.
I had looked it up after the first time you had mentioned it. And, you were right, my initial comment as a reply to Don's was inappropriate (sorry Don Geddis). I had conflated his comment with a few others that were less developed/nuanced.
In regards to the application of the "mere addition paradox", in this case I'm not sure a lot of the assumptions of that theory would apply. The theory was grounded in human populations versus engineered non-human populations whose subjects have no agency and may have 0 excess to happiness and are subjected to a large X amount of suffering. In order to attempt to extend the repugnant conclusion to include such a group would require a really really really really really really long comment/post.
At least that's how I think it would stand as applied to factory farming, which was more or less the subject of SA's article.
But, as Don had suggested in his comment, there's a difference between free range farming and factory farming, and consequently with how one would approach the ethics in question.
Thank you!
If we don't eat cows, pigs, chickens, etc, they're not going to be released into the wild to frolic freely. None of these are wild animals any longer; some of them have been so changed by selective breeding that they cannot survive at all without human intervention.
I think "if you can create a life, you should" to be a morally dubious position, but the choice isn't "happy cow or dead cow?" The choice is "dead cow or no cow?"
I understand the argument, but it ignores the fact that wild animals exist and compete with domestic animals for land use. Plus all the second order environmental harms of animal agriculture.
Cutting down the rainforests in order to farm more cattle or grow more soy to feed cattle with can be justified as benefiting humans and maybe even cows, but it comes at the expense of lots of other forms of life.
Most wild animals are not frolicking but living pretty short grim lives full of suffering followed by a painful death.
If you were to take a well managed free range farm, and rewild it, this would almost certainly result in a decrease in animal well-being / increase in suffering.
The problem with Scott's chicken v beef question is that it doesn't take into account the farming method, which makes a huge difference to the environmental and ethical impacts.
That's a reasonable point, arguments like this are why I'm a fairly half-hearted vegetarian (I was keeping to it fine for the last few months but I just ate a leftover sausage roll). If the majority of meat came from free range farms and not from factory farms, I'd be much more comfortable eating meat (although since that would make meat much more expensive, so I probably still wouldn't eat much of it). I just think the trade-off between agriculture and wild environments is worth pointing out, since the idea that destroying the environment is good actually is a perspective held only by a very small number of people.
Since you could also argue that most humans are living long grim lives full of suffering followed by a painful death, I'm not sure where this line of thinking leads except to the nihilistic conclusion that we'd all be better off if we were dead. I'm not in favour of suffering, I just tend to think it's a price worth paying for continuing to live.
I'm unsure if opposing factory farming in light of this is philosophically coherent, I guess I assume most animals have evolved to tolerate the suffering they experience in their natural environment (since those that couldn't cope would go extinct), but the overcrowding of factory farms seem to be a step above that. On the other hand, unlike animals in the wild they're generally not starving since that's bad for business.
Conditions for cattle on the whole seem better than those for chickens, I see cows grazing in fields quite often and they seem pretty content to me, so that's probably worth factoring in. I don't buy meat, but I do consume dairy but not eggs for this exact reason (and also my enduring love of cheese, but I want to pretend there's a moral justification for it).
I used to be vegan but switched to eating free range meat after thinking along these lines of reasoning. Bit long for a comment but I outlined the reasons behind the decision here https://www.livenowthrivelater.co.uk/2018/10/is-the-moral-landscape-a-wilderness/
> wild animals exist and compete with domestic animals for land use.
It's bad too. More wild animals = more horrific 'competition'.
or "happy then dead cow" vrs "unhappy then dead cow" vrs "no cow"
My best guess (see https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ for a more detailed look) is that farmed beef is better off existing than not existing, and farmed chickens are better off *not* existing than existing.
Note that this is baked into Scott's argument above: if you eat beef, you are only offsetting their carbon cost, not their suffering cost.
Others are dismissing this argument, but I think it raises the real crux of the issue. We as consumers need to continue demanding higher levels of animal welfare and we need to demand our government continues to increase the levels of transparency in animal husbandry.
I personally, despite being a strong libertarian, actually do favor stronger animal welfare regulations. I think it fits into a "tragedy of the commons" framework along the lines of many other consumer protection type regulations.
The need for full vegetarianism/veganism declines substantially if we get rid of factory farming. We don't need to force these species to extinction, we just need to stop torturing them.
Right. I am a vegetarian but if I knew that animals were raised in an environment where they lived good lives that ended in one bad day I would be much more likely to eat meat. And honestly given how hard it is to convince people to give up meat I think it is a shame that groups in favor of animal welfare don't push in this direction.
Sorry to interrupt your discussion of an important ethical dilemma, but in practice, "a large supply of happy free-range chickens that die of old age" isn't implausible at all. Chickens lay eggs, cows produce milk. That's enough reason to keep raising them, even if the whole of humanity collectively decides to go vegetarian tomorrow.
The chickens and cows that are being killed would not exist if not for meat-eating. The existence of other chickens and cows not being raised for meat is irrelevant. (Also, domestication brings specialization. Broilers and layers are different breeds of chickens, and beef and dairy are different breeds of cattle.)
Hens are edible, but not at all in the same way as chickens are. It's not a replacement.
While it is plausible you could raise eggs and milk without doing so they both also require quite a bit of killing since males are pretty much worthless for milk and eggs and don't justify being fed into old age.
Several problems if we want to get into the plausibility of this:
- Free-range is a fairly low bar to clear and doesn't guarantee animal welfare.
- Male chickens don't lay eggs, keeping them around is twice as expensive as killing them.
- Egg laying declines over time, so waiting for hens to die of old age is much more expensive than just disposing of them as soon as egg production starts to drop (you can kill them or give them away for free, that's where some of my parents pet chickens came from - scrawny looking things, but good egg-layers!).
- Some animals will die from injuries or disease rather than old age (seems obvious but this can massively affect welfare).
There was an adversarial collaboration on SSC on the ethics of eating meat. One of the authors started with the position that maybe we should buy more meat, so that there are more factory animals, as their existence is a net positive, but in the process of collaboration came to the conclusion that the state in which farmed chickens exist is worse than death. https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/
Beyond Meat and other food tech startups and other companies producing vegan/vegetarian products are entirely supported by there being enough consumers that have switched their individual dietary changes.
But there’s no evidence they are more sustainable. They just put their CO2 emission into a different machine than a cow.
Isn't that machine more efficient than a cow? Honest question. I thought that was part of the appeal, was that it required significantly fewer inputs to just grow a burger in a lab than to grow a whole cow and then slice/dice accordingly.
I'll have to look up the citation I recall. I don't remember the mechanics of it off hand.
The answer is more equivocal than either one of us would like. Here is the most thorough paper I have found on the topic. It's a little hard to discern the answer one way or another. You have to taken into account long-term versus short-term, CO2 versus methane, geography of meat production, and a whole lot of other variables that I don't fully understand. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2019.00005/full
That paper is about cultured meat, which is an "emerging technology" (I would say "vaporware") that involves growing actual cow cells into a cow steak in the lab, with no living cow ever being involved. So far as I can tell this is not actually possible yet, and certainly not producing food for the supermarkets.
Beyond Meat, the substitute mentioned by OP, is a classic meat-substitute product made from vegetable food inputs like soy via food engineering. Unlike cultured meat, this is actually available in stores now, but its carbon footprint is not addressed by that paper.
Prima facie, you can expect plant based food to be about 10 times more efficient.
Sun -> plants -> human vs sun -> grass -> livestock -> human
Where every step in the chain is c. 10% energy efficient.
The problem with this reasoning is that Sun>Grass>Humans doesn't work.
If you put grazing livestock on grassland that's unsuitable for the cultivation of other crops, it's actually an efficient use of land and resources.
Sure but that's a fairly limited scenario. There are a whole lot of farms dedicated to producing feed for animals that could just as well produce food for humans.
This is an interesting potential pivot. Is CO2 the only environmental evil that matters? What about degradation of land by working what should be fallow farmland --or the depletion of potable water that is diverted to agriculture. Plus, some crops are sustainable and others not. The component parts of "veggie meat" may themselves present significant environmental costs (I am not sure which crops are most impactful or which go into v. meat) All of these (and many more that I am not expert enough to elaborate) may make this a more complicated dilemma.
CO2 is critical to reduce --but water is critical to conserve and keep accessible. We see this exact issue in Florida where, despite our state-wide, near perpetual drought, a great deal of our aquifer and our main source of water from Lake Okeechobee is being diverted to sugar farms across the state. Even if those were soy bean farms, is that an apt trade-off?
Plus, the warming of great swaths of farmland is changing the growing environment. So far indoor agriculture is too limited for global industrial use. These are not ancillary to the question of what is more responsible to eat from an Earth-preserving standpoint.
Lab-grown meat is currently just barely less CO2 intensive than cow-grown meat.
But my understanding is that most of the energy inputs come from the grid, so with more nuclear, solar, and wind, it can become significantly less CO2-intensive.
I donno about "lab grown meat" but it is clear[1] that a burger made of pea protein has much lower associated CO2 emissions than a beef burger.
[1] http://css.umich.edu/sites/default/files/publication/CSS18-10.pdf
from the conclusion:
" Based on a comparative assessment of the current Beyond Burger production system with the 2017 beef LCA by Thoma et al, the Beyond Burger generates 90% less greenhouse gas emissions, requires 46% less non-renewable energy, has >99%less impact on water scarcity and 93% less impact on land use than a ¼ pound of U.S. beef. "
I'm certainly not an expert on this. But you cite a different paper. Did you read the one that I provided?
I took a look at it. It is about a different question. Tissue culture meat vs conventional beef. The source I linked to addresses the difference in footprint between a Beyond Beef pea protein based burger and a beef burger.
You are right to point out the conflict of interest h/o the production of pea/vegetable protein has a lower footprint than meat protein[1][2].
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/less-meat-or-sustainable-meat
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959652621006673
And also, note that the client for that paper is Beyond Better. Not exactly conflict free research.
It would be a little shocking if a reduction in aggregate demand for a certain kind of meat didn't impact production eventually, though presumably there'd first be a price shift which over time leads to reductions in i.e. new factory starts.
Depending on the elasticity of demand in the rest of the market, a minority segment that stops consuming for moral/ideological reasons might well just lead to increased consumption by the other consumers, as price drops.
That doesn't make sense unless the cost curve has significant convexity.
How could it not? Surely the chicken supply curve isn't perfectly inelastic, so shifting the demand curve should on average reduce the amount sold and thus the amount produced. (Similarly, it's hard to believe that you save one chicken for every chicken you refuse to eat, because surely the chicken supply curve isn't perfectly elastic.)
I know that only thinking in terms of the pure supply & demand curves doesn't capture all relevant info. But unless you have a concrete counterargument and empirical evidence that the reduced demand is somehow perfectly balanced out by something else despite elasticity in price, I think the strong presumption should be that it causes fewer pounds of chicken to be produced.
(Note: I forgot to include the demand elasticity, but my conclusion is the same — I'm guessing the demand isn't perfectly elastic, so I'm guessing refusing to eat a chicken, on average, saves more than 0 (but less than 1) chickens.)
The curves are simply that mechanisms through the obvious fact "if fewer people pay farmers to raise chickens, then farmers will raise fewer chickens" is implemented. If I go out and buy a chicken, either a chicken that otherwise wouldn't get raised and killed does get raised and killed, or someone who would otherwise have bought a chicken doesn't do so. We need only ask whether it makes sense to assume the latter holds in all cases.
Yeah I agree it's immediately obvious that buying less chicken should do some combination of (a) reducing the amount of chicken raised and killed, and (b) reducing the price of chicken to entice more people to buy it.
The benefit of thinking in terms supply and demand curves for me is that it visually reveals an important, not-immediately-obvious fact (at least not to me!). Namely, that the answer to "what's the tradeoff between (a) and (b)?" depends on the price-elasticities of the supply and demand of chicken. In particular, once you see that, it becomes hard to believe it will be zero of (a) and all of (b).
On the margin, in expectation, it's basically guaranteed they will. That is, if a million people giving up chicken entirely would result in the shutting down of some chicken factory farms—and it would—then each incremental person giving it up makes ever-so-slightly more likely (averaged across all the randomness) that one of the factory farms will be shut down.
I eat chicken and not beef because I don't believe in eating something I could not personally kill. Also, I try to only buy free-range chickens, which I think minimizes the suffering. It is too bad that PETA turned evil.
Interesting analysis, though.
Do you mean killing with your bare hands? If I had a gun, or even an axe, I think a cow would be easier.
Hmm, I dunno - regardless of the tool situation, the cow stands a much better chance of defeating me than the chicken, if we assume it's a fight to the death.
I figure either animal will try to escape rather than fight back.
I have no experience with live chickens, but once in Boy Scouts we thought it would be fun to scare some cattle. They outnumbered us by a wide margin but made no attempt to fight or scare us in return.
If it's a cow with calf, stay the heck away. Cows with young calves are very protective and will attack if they feel threatened. I don't know if the cattle you tried to scare as a kid were heifers or bullocks, but a herd won't do much - mostly. Though it's always more prudent to make sure you are not surrounded by them or have clear space to get away. https://www.hsa.ie/eng/Your_Industry/Agriculture_Forestry/Livestock/
I don't remember if they had calves. I guess not. We chased them into the woods and then somehow got surrounded by cattle running in all directions. For one scary moment a bull ran right toward me; then it noticed me and turned aside.
For me this seems like an even better reason to eat the cow, It's her or me!
Seriously though, in terms of the great-grandparent post, I think that the "argument from personal squeamishness" is not all that effective for me. I know that I, as a sheltered city-dweller, would feel bad if I actually had to personally kill the animals I eat. On the other hand, I also know that if it came down to a situation where I _had_ to, then I'd probably feel really bad the first time, slightly less bad the second time, and by the hundredth time I'd be as desensitised to slaughtering animals as any farmer.
Cows have been selected for thousands of generations for not fighting to the death.
The wild ones too. Fighting to the death is a good way to get a dangerous injury, even if you "win".
A lost of animals do fight each other, despite the danger. And when it comes to dealing with a predator, fighting is preferable to being eaten. But once an animal is domesticated, getting eaten is actually evolutionarily beneficial. Cattle that fight getting eaten don't get bred (and yeah, if they do get eaten, obviously they don't get bred after that, but their relatives do).
I think the point Bullseye was making is that while a lot of animals do fight, it is relatively uncommon for fights to be to the death. Behaviors differ amongst animals of course but IIRC in many animals once it is clear who is likely to win in a fight the would-be loser surrenders. I believe this is how heirarchy is decided in some primates and how mating and territory rights are decided by animals such as sealions.
Ease is irrelevant. Integrity is the point. Would you shoot, slaughter, skin, and eat a cow?
No, that sounds messy and difficult. I'd pay someone to do it for me, though.
Would you watch the whole process, start to finish and then eat it? (Although hands-on is truer to the thought experiment).
In lieu of payment? Sure, I suppose I'd be willing to do that once or twice. Eventually, I imagine I'd just as soon pay for my meat in money rather than time.
Per capita beef consumption in the US is ~58 pounds per year. At best, you'd have to watch someone kill a cow about every 4-5 years or so.
Lol. Fair enough.
Given that one of our field trips was to the local slaughterhouse... some people will be very badly affected by knowing where meat comes from. Other people won't. Aesthetic arguments are poor ones and probably work better for people who have little to no contact with farm animals. Kids may be squeamish about learning that the cute lambs or whatever will end up as meat in the butcher's window, but that's life.
What kind of school (and at what ages) is bringing students to a slaughterhouse? Just wondering where it diverges so significantly from my suburban American public standard-bearing of comfortable fantasy.
Of course. We have live chickens in markets in East Asia. It's morally irresponsible not to see the animal you are about to eat. Also tastes better too, since you know it's fresh.
People used to bring chicks home to raise themselves, then eat on the dinner table. Families in many rural areas have a little coop in the backyard for a few chickens.
By this logic (if I'm understanding correctly), digestion is immoral. If I had to look at my stomach digesting all the food I ate, I'd probably starve to death.
Absolutely everything about the inside of living things disgusts me immensely. The fact that people don't like thinking about where their food comes from doesn't need to reflect anything more profound than that
People should be less squeamish and more willing to accept reasonable cruelty and disgustingness in general. Squeamishness is reflective of a lack of curiosity and self-reflection.
Squeamishness is not reflective of a good moral character.
A willingness to face unpleasantries is often described as "courage". Bravery is morally commendable in many moral traditions.
I've done it for deer, as have a huge number of other people. Other than a vaguely different shape and a lot more mass, what's the difference?
Who suggested that people have not? Of course some people have hunted and butchered their own meat. Most westerners have not.
Ex farm kid here. I've killed and eaten both.
Killing a chicken is a surprisingly personal experience, because you have to be so physically (and thus psychologically) close to the bird when it dies. You are holding the bird with one hand and the axe with the other; it's a very personal act of violence.
Killing a cow is more physically distant, thanks to guns, and was much less traumatising to our cows because they were always positioned in such a way that they died in the middle of snacking on something particularly tasty.
Both kinds of death always made me give a small prayer of thanksgiving to whatever gods may be, and the soul of the animal.
Death up close (as with birth) is a palpably sacred event, and not to be taken lightly.
Personally, I did not become desensitised to death. I became better at making it happen, but I never became able to shrug it off as routine. The people who work as the 'knockers' (the ones who do the actual killing) in abattoirs are widely known to be a very specialised kind of personality; I'm not sure that most ordinary people become as blasé about taking lives as some have assumed. Over time I have become more averse to killing, not less. It is quite a profound act.
BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how you plan to humanely kill a cow with an axe. I expect you could do it if you had to, but it wouldn't be very easy. Nor very kind to the cow. They are big, and opinionated, and your chances of hitting anything important on the first swing are... not good. Maybe if it was baled up in a crush and couldn't move, and you hit it on the forehead with the back of the axe to stun it? Then cut its throat with a very sharp knife?
> BTW, I'm still trying to figure out how you plan to humanely kill a cow with an axe.
I didn't really think about it much, to be honest. I just figured the cow would be easier to hit than the chicken because it's so much bigger.
From my personal experience, I'd say the exact opposite is true!
Can you tranquilize the animal?
How would you tranquilise an animal prior to slaughter, without then ending up consuming the tranquiliser yourself?
Also, the process of tranquilising the animal would, in all likelihood be more traumatic than shooting it where it stands.
A humane death is completely possible without tranquiliser, as long as it considers the animal's comfort, and is swift. Factory farming hasn't made either of those things a priority, unfortunately.
You can kill either pretty trivially. Cows get shot in the head. Chickens you put upside down in this funnel thing and stick an ice pick looking tool their neck
Most cows also die by bleeding. They have their spinal cord severed from their brain and then their carotid artery cut. This is largely to comply with kosher rules, since few meat producers can afford two separate slaughter productions.
Hmm... I thought most ranchers were using bolt guns. Maybe that’s a dated technique.
Yes--thank you for correction! The bolt gun causes a sort of concussion or a penetrating wound at the brain stem. Your point may be a better articulated answer than mine --but in the absence of editing capability...... :-(
I'm under the impression that most meat producers in the US make no attempt to comply with kosher rules, hence why most meat sold isn't certified kosher and why kosher meat is always from a dedicated brand.
Next time you engage in hand-to-hand combat with a sea urchin, please video it.
My same rationale for eating fish but not mammals or birds (or analids).
I don't understand the rationale. Are you unconcerned about the suffering caused by introducing additional demand for animal-raising into the system by purchasing the chickens? It's hard for me to wrap my mind around being more motivated by your "I couldn't personally kill" it principle, since it seems largely disconnected from the weighing of real-world consequences.
I mean, sure, it's not a utilitarian view - more of an honor system. Is your confusion because you accidentally assumed CG was utilitarian, or are you actually having difficulty understanding a deontological worldview?
He says he buys free-range eggs to minimize suffering, so he cares about that. Does he really have a deontological worldview?
Fair.
It is a moral view. Similar to not endorsing going to war unless you (or your children) are also willing to fight in that war.
Again that throws me for a loop, because you're putting other unwilling participants (draftees, civilians, third-party collateral damage, etc) through death and pain just because you're willing to go through it yourself.
You could say that death and suffering aren't the concern (it's a "deontological worldview" or whatever), but in that case what's the problem with war in the first place? Is war just concerning because it's aesthetically ugly? Just because society says it's bad or something? Is it really disconnected from death and suffering?
It isn't really the same logic.
How did you come to adopt such a moral view? Your rule seems totally arbitrary to me. There's no cosmic notary that translates your abidance to any particular rule into anything beyond that: mere rule-following. Where is the value in creating and then abiding by rules if not to achieve some better outcomes in terms of conscious experience? And if achieving better outcomes is indeed the purpose of your rule-following, why pretend as if such rules as "don't eat an animal you personally couldn't kill" should apply so absolutely to achieve the best outcomes? Surely there's a more direct way of choosing the better of two possible courses of action than by consulting that particular rule, no? And surely there must be other rules you have that sometimes come into conflict? How do you determine which rules take precedence in any given situation? How do you come to determine what the rules are in the first place?
I eat chicken not beef for purely utilitarian reasons.
Nutritionally, the meat is more lean. Per gram of chicken you get *more* nutritional value per gram of beef (I feel like that could be factored Into the calculations in this article). There is also a higher content of essential amino acids, even after offsetting the fat content difference.
Additionally, chicken is cheaper by far. I can get one good steak for around $10usd, or I can get a whole bag of chicken breasts for the same price.
Chicken in my experience fits into more possible dishes. Everything that beef fits into, chicken can be substituted, but not vice-versa. Off the top of my head I can't think of any beef dishes meant to be served cold. You don't really see beef salads, or cold-beef pasta. I'm sure they exist, but it still seems more limited.
As far as the moral aspect goes, I have come to terms with the fact that an individuals consumption makes no difference towards production. "But if everybody did it..." is the common argument against this. If I were to go out campaigning against a form of consumption, and led a movement that affected others to change their consumption, then yes, leading by example may make a difference. But as an individual with no plan on affecting others via my consumption, I am practical and pragmatic about it. Sure I still feel bad about what is happening to animals I'm factory farming and the meat industry. However, I am at peace with my decision knowing that unless I create other factors I would only be denying myself nutrition, efficiency, and financial value to no other end.
Thai beef salad is great! Highly recommend trying it even if I agree with your wider point.
Banned for a week for no-content criticism.
Another great argument for general vegetarianism when possible -- avoiding shaky math.
Definitely the best option. Of course there is also the option of just cutting your meat consumption in half. Eat lots of nuts and seeds and you'll need less meat.
And, lacking a better place to say it, a PSA: "cage free" means they're all stacked in there as before, just without walls between them. "Pasture raised" means what most people think cage free means. "Free range" is something between those two (6 hours of 2 square feet). "Certified humane" means they're not lying about it when they say it's cage free, free range, or pasture raised.
And just to make it more complicated, all of this can differ in different countries. It's been a while since I looked into it, but I seem to remember that in the UK, 'free range' chickens have somewhat worse conditions than the chickens raised for 'free range' eggs. However, 'organic' chickens had living conditions on par with 'free range' eggs.
Or it could be the other way around.
*Reducing* your meat consumption is definitely underrated.
What is your source for this?
https://www.eater.com/2019/7/17/20696498/whats-the-difference-cage-free-free-range-pasture-raised-eggs says
> Cage-free, a term regulated by the USDA, means that the eggs come from hens that, put simply, aren’t caged: They can “freely roam a building, room, or enclosed area with unlimited access to food and fresh water during their production cycle, but [do] not have access to the outdoors.”
https://www.onegreenplanet.org/animalsandnature/think-you-know-free-range-and-cage-free-chicken-think-again/
> A cage-free label indicates that chickens have lived entirely free of cages.
In terms of offsets, buying meat or eggs where the animals got to live mostly live animals balances the scales for me.
If they have the "Certified Humane" logo, then these are the requirements:
https://certifiedhumane.org/decode-egg-labels/
Cage free then means 1.5 sq ft per hen and no ammonia odor. Your first link gives the typical non-cage-free cage size as 8.5x11, so cage free means 2.3x more space. So I was exaggerating a bit. Your second link shows pictures, which probably speak truer than the numbers as to what all this really means.
I avoid all moral ambiguity by just going with pasture raised. Costs a lot more than regular eggs, but still not that much in the grand scheme of things. Where this system breaks down is at the farmer's market, where the eggs have no label but the farmer swears they're treated nicely.
The maths of vegetarianism is no better. Dairy cows and laying chickens get killed at the end of their productive lives (when their production drops off and they're no longer profitable), they don't retire to the countryside. There's still plenty of animal suffering / death involved (in addition to the fate of the actual producing animals, male dairy cows are slaughtered very young and male chicks are disposed of after hatching (sometimes by being chucked into a grinder). In principle, it might be possible to have an ethical vegetarian system but in practice I'm not sure it's better than eating meat (it might work out better on a calories per animal death measure).
well, i think it is better, since omnivores usually eat dairy products in addition to meat. so vegetarianism, though it's far from perfect, should at least reduce demand for factory farming by half or something like that compared to omnivorousness. (i don't think it's likely that most vegetarians replace their lost meat intake with added dairy and egg, not to any great extent.)
Methane lasts in the atmosphere for 12 years. So a cow today is merely "replacing" the methane emitted by a cow in 2009. Which was replacing the methane from a cow in 1997. Replacing 1985. 1973. Etc.
Therefore eating beef today is not adding to greenhouse gas impacts on global warming, as long as the total number of cows is fairly level. It has been decreasing in my country for the last few decades so I feel no moral imperative whatsoever.
I would welcome arguments against this position. It seems to me like we expect everything to be net zero except cows, which must lead to reduced greenhouse gases.
You can apply the same exact logic to forestation and deforestation. A tree is only taking carbon from the environment while it's growing; once it's full size, it's carbon neutral. When you cut it down and burn it, you release all of that carbon back in the atmosphere. You cannot have a large forest, and say it compensates for X cows per year. You would have to keep planting new trees (and keep the old) to compensate.
The dynamics is mirrored, but the effect is cumulative. If we have a high number of cows and low number of trees, the warming effect is stronger, and the damage accumulates.
You eat less cows, the damage done is less.
And of course, this entirely ignores the fact that once an ecosystem collapses, no amount of reforestation and vegetarian diets will bring it back.
I think you're mistaken that trees stop absorbing CO2. They never really "stop growing", so they never stop absorbing CO2. (Even if they grow no taller, they still grow wider, which adds a lot of biomass each year.) In fact I believe "fully grown" trees absorb more CO2 per year than saplings and young trees.
Just to add: my above comment is another reason why preserving existing forests is much more important than planting new trees.
Where does this ever growing accumulation of carbon go then? Do forests produce coal deposits over time? Or does it all just go back into the air next time that forest burns?
Sometimes a tree will burn, and it will be released that way. Most of the time it will decompose, and then the bacteria or fungi will release it that way. Every time, some bit of biomass goes back into the ground just due to the inefficiencies of the processes that will get it back in the air. The carbon cycle is the least aggressively stable of Earth's cycles; it wants to be a closed loop, and only gets rid of excess very slowly.
Just to tag onto Ravi D'Elia's answer, I think most forests will have a very slowly growing layer of soil under them, and this soil has some carbon in it. So it's not quite the same as producing coal deposits over time (I think that requires some pretty serious geology to happen on top of what used to be a forest) but it is a slow and steady carbon sequestration process.
When you cut down a piece of forest you also tend to damage the soil pretty severely, both directly with all your tree-cutting machines rolling over it, and indirectly by removing the trees which were holding it together, exposing it to the elements. This is why agriculture on 'reclaimed' rainforest needs to keep cutting into the rainforest: because the soil degrades rapidly when the trees aren't there.
Having written that, I realise that I don't see a way for this "carbon-rich soil getting churned up" to turn into "carbon dioxide in the atmosphere" so maybe it's not relevant to the discussion at hand...
This Nature article estimates that worldwide forests are a net carbon sink of about 8Gt CO2/year:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00976-6
This other Nature article reports on an interesting experiment in which the CO2 levels above 500m^2 plots of mature (90-year-old) eucalyptus forest were artificialy boosted by 150ppm. They found a 12% increase in CO2 uptake, of which 13% ended up as a net increase in the carbon stored in wood and soil:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00962-0
These numbers are both on the low side, indicating the mature forests do indeed have a much lower net absorption of CO2 compared to younger forests (or grassland et cetera). But they're by no means carbon neutral.
My 2 minutes Google research just now suggests that methane is mainly "removed" from the atmosphere *by being converted into CO2*, which suggests to me that cows cause a long-term problem in a similar way to any other source of greenhouse gas.
If you believe otherwise, could you please explain the mechanism by which the methane stops causing greenhouse issues after 12 years? And also why you believe this mechanism "scales" in such a way that eliminating cows wouldn't allow us to "transfer" the benefits of this mechanism to some non-cow-generated problem instead.
My 2 minute research suggests that methane is a worse greenhouse gas per molecule and is only causing less climate change because it produced at a lower concentration. This means that converting methane into carbon dioxide does substantially ameliorate its greenhouse gas effect.
OK, but JP is explicitly talking about "net zero". "Net zero" requires you clean up the CO2 as well, no?
The carbon in that CO₂ comes from the plants the cow has eaten. Those plants regrow each year, converting CO₂ to various organic molecules using energy from sunlight. The cows then eat the plants, converting the organic compounds into beef, CO₂ and methane, and the methane is later converted to CO₂ too. Other animals would also produce a similar amount of CO₂. It looks pretty net-zero to me.
Methane isn't produced by cows or any other animal, it is produced by methanogenic bacteria which are ubiquitous in the environment, inside all creatures, in soil, on everything.
They produce methane as waste when digesting vegetation. That's good, otherwise the world would be smothered in dead veg, and all heterotrophs would starve.
Note that the veg will rot and produce methane no matter whether it passes through a gut or not. Once the plant has grown the methane is inevitable. Always has been.
There are also methanotrophs that eat methane. They are in the soil too. It's a natural cycle.
Much of the confusion and ideological posturing results from looking at parts of the system selected to support a cherished conclusion.
Not actually true; aerobic respiration doesn't produce methane. It's specifically *anaerobic* decomposition of matter that produces reduced gases like methane (and hydrogen, for that matter).
I'm not sure this makes sense. The immutables are the carbon and hydrogen atoms involved, not the specific form they are in, and different breakdown pathways could obviously result in more or less methane relative to CO2 + water. Even if you assume that all plant breakdown produces methane in the same proportion that a cow's gut does, you still have the increase in plant matter grown for the purpose of feeding the cows, which (under the assumption) is a CO2 + water --> methane process, and which would not happen in the counterfactual with less cows.
There's also the question of where all this carbon to make methane is coming from in the first place. If we are using petroleum to make fertilizer to grow feed to feed to cows, then I can see how this is a net increase in carbon. But if cows are creating methane from grass that captured carbon from the atmosphere, is there a net increase in carbon (and yes, methane has more of a greenhouse effect than carbon dioxide, but methane eventually turns into carbon dioxide)?
No, there is no net increase in carbon. Even fertilizer synthesis only requires air, water, and energy. After all, bacteria do it. Air is 80% nitrogen. Water has all the hydrogen and oxygen needed for NH4 or NO3.
However, our technologies are a bit primitive still. That's a real issue, but we prefer to diddle around with these sorts of pretenses rather than do real thought work. We can pretend to be virtuous while evading any real effort.
Fertilizer doesn't *require* carbon, but hydrocarbons are used to make it, so presumably it's *cheaper* to use carbon.
Fertilizer doesn't supply carbon. It supplies reduced nitrogen. All the carbon in the grass that a cow eats comes from CO2 the grass pulled out of the atmosphere.
After doing a little bit of googling, it appears that hydrocarbons are used to provide hydrogen for fertilizer. The carbon isn't in the fertilizer, but presumably it's left over afterwards, and released into the atmosphere.
Wait what...? What hydrogen? The principal component of fertilizer is reduced nitrogen in various forms (e.g. ammonia or ammonium nitrate), plus phosphates, and sometimes assorted minerals, calcium and potassium salts, et cetera. Where are you getting "hydrogen?" Plants don't need hydrogen, or more generally reduced H. For that matter, in what form would it be? (Obviously not the gas...)
The only thing that occurs to me is you're looking at how ammonia itself is made, industrially, which is generally the Haber process with atmospheric N2 and H2 derived from steam reformation of methane (from natural gas mostly). That definitely uses fossil fuels, so it is a carbon-positive process, as are *all* processes that use fossil fuels, simply because you're withdrawing carbon form a long-term repository and sticking it back in the atmosphere as CO2. Is that what you mean? That's true, and it's why farming -- or almost any human activity is "carbon positive" -- because it uses fossil fuels to power it at some stage. But it doesn't have anything to do with where the methane in cow farts comes from. That comes form plant carbohydrates (mostly), and those come from atmospheric CO2 via photosynthesis.
>The principal component of fertilizer is reduced nitrogen in various forms (e.g. ammonia or ammonium nitrate) ... Where are you getting "hydrogen?"
That would be from the *reduced* nitrogen, where "reduced" is basically chenical-ese for "attached to a bunch of hydrogen". Ammonia = NH3, ammonium nitrate = NH4NO3, so 2-3 hydrogen atoms per nitrogen atom. Which, since you didn't get the hydrogen by electrolyzing water, means 0.5-1.5 molecules of carbon dioxide out the exhaust for every atom's worth of reduced nitrogen in the fertilizer.
Yeah OK that's what I thought, you're thinking of how the ammonia was made in the first place. I was confused because this is not how farmers (or chemists) speak of what's "in" fertilizer.
Also by the way you're wrong about the detailed origins of the H. Half the H atoms *do* come from water, the other half from CH4, and the overall stoichiometry is 3/8 CO2 for every NH3.
My understanding is that the most important thing is not the cow chemistry but the land the cows are on. If you've got cows grazing on grass (or, more commonly, cows indoors being fed grain grown on a field), then you need a big piece of land growing either grass or grain. Both of these uses of land are much worse for carbon sequestration than most wild land types (forest is the obvious one, but even wild grass is surprisingly good).
So if you eat cows, you're creating a demand for an extremely sub-optimal use of land, which is net positive in terms of emissions compared to if you don't eat cows.
But also, the fact that you're temporarily turning carbon dioxide into methane for a decade or so is also significant. Ok, the methane isn't exactly building up, but it would still be better if it wasn't there. If we reduce our cow consumption, we reduce that temporary-but-constantly-replenished methane content of the atmosphere.
"It seems to me like we expect everything to be net zero except cows, which must lead to reduced greenhouse gases."
I don't think that's true. We want the sum of everything to be net zero. Which means either that each individual thing should be net zero, or some of them can be net positive while others need to be net negative to cancel out. In general, we want the easy things to make net negative to be net negative, and the things where we get lots of value from emissions to be net positive because those are very valuable.
Cows are one of the things where being net negative is relatively easy, while transport is something that is valuable enough to allow it to remain net positive and look for other things to be net negative.
Don't forget that absent human consumption of chicken (and eggs) and beef, cows and chickens go extinct, at least their domsticated versions.
Yeah, but if 1% of the world's population still wants to eat cows and chicken 1% as much as the average American currently does, then that's enough to keep the species extant but it still saves pretty much all of the climate and animal welfare costs.
My point is that you shouldn't use "I want to stop the species going extinct" as an excuse for eating chicken and beef. Unless aliens start firing vegan death-rays at Earth, the whole world isn't going to give up on chicken and beef at the same time as you.
Why should anyone care if domesticated cows and chickens go extinct? It's not like they're part of a natural ecosystem that may collapse without them.
And to add to that, surely we could keep some around on sanctuary farms for kids to go visit, or as pets even, if we want to avoid extinction.
+1, I don't think it's a problem for these species to go extinct, except for some kind of sentimental value or scientific curiosity. It's a problem when an individual being suffers and dies because it's sentient. But a species is an abstract concept; it's not sentient.
I would expect them to end up in a similar position as horses - not directly useful, but some people keep them for nostalgia/tourism value, in relatively good conditions.
I do think that extinction / very low population is a better outcome than factory farming / suffering.
I thought most beef cattle isn't factory farmed but instead spends most of their time outside.
It would seem like even with a stressful month on a feedlot most cows lives are probably better off than the average member of a quite a few wild species.
(It does seem true that pigs and chickens would be better off extinct)
from a report by the humane society:
> Most cattle raised for beef are castrated, de-horned, and branded, painful procedures often performed without any anesthesia. For seven months, calves graze on the range before they are transported to feedlots, where they are fattened on unnatural diets. Within six months, they reach market weight of 544 kg (1,200 lb) and are trucked to slaughter. As with other animals to be killed for food, cattle are not given any food, water, or protection from the elements during the journey.
>
> [...]
>
> Cattle suffer the same mistreatment as pigs during both their transport and slaughter. Additionally, typically during or after transport, some cattle can have difficulty getting up from a recumbent position. Nonambulatory cattle—referred to as “downers” by the industry—are animals who collapse for a variety of metabolic, infectious, toxic, and/or musculoskeletal reasons and are too sick or injured to stand or walk on their own. Data from federally inspected slaughter facilities estimate 1.1-1.5% of U.S. dairy cows go down in a year, but this does not include those who collapse on-farm. A 2007 review of nonambulatory cattle suggests that the number of downed cattle on U.S. farms or feedlots or who are sent to slaughter in any given year may approach 500,000. It has been reported that dairy cows account for approximately 75% of downed cattle.
=> https://www.humanesociety.org/sites/default/files/docs/hsus-report-welfare-animals-meat-egg-dairy-industry.pdf
so to sum up, yes most cattle in the us spend most of their time outdoors (excluding transportation to the slaughterhouse and time spent in the slaughterhouse), though half of that is in feedlots where they cannot really move.
This will sound like a contrarian troll comment but I mean it quite sincerely
Why does the calculation for the net moral cost of beef vs chicken not factor in the utility gain/loss from each of those in your diet?
I can't speak for other people but I can say personally that I would be experiencing quite a bit of suffering personally if I could never eat beef again, but I would not be experiencing that level of suffering if I could never eat chicken again.
I am in general resistant to utilitarian reasoning like this, for reasons I have expounded on at length in your various comments sections throughout the years. By framing everything in terms of this, people (or, at least, rationalists) are put in a position where they feel that their own preferences are invalid unless they can be justified on utilitarian grounds. It's not that hard of a jump from there to "my preferences don't matter" or even "my preferences don't exist"
But they do exist! And they do matter! It is fundamentally meaningful to factor in the cost _in human suffering_ of dietary restrictions when you're running these numbers.
(Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions. I imagine most of your instinctive reactions to my position is some variant of "come on, don't be ridiculous, nobody cares that much about their diet". I think most people do, and it's us here who are unique in that we don't care as much)
Nitpicky comment:
You don't need to justify your personal preferences on utilitarian grounds. They're part of the total utility you're trying to optimize.
Utilitarianism as it is usually construed would not ask anybody to make a large sacrifice except for a proportionately large benefit (to themselves or others).
As long as you're okay to include the pleasure of killing you in the moral utility calculations of a serial killer, I'm fine with your reasoning.
>Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions.
Yeah yeah, we're all beautiful and unique snowflakes.
This seems a bit odd. Clearly the serial killer is already making these decisions presumably on the basis of this sort of calculation (if less explicitly), so it's already included from the operative point of view. I'm pretty certain though that however euphoric killing Tim would make the serial killer is not going to adjust the balance of any sensible utilitarian consideration of a serial killer's actions, but it should certainly be a factor that is entertained.
If this was meant as a throwaway knock-down of Tim's argument, it seems to fail on all fronts really: the logic can and probably is already applied, but you would need to attach very low utility to human life for it to be a valid objection.
Similarly, you would need to attach extremely high utility to a single human meal and extremely low utility to an animal life for it to be a noticeable modification to the basic utilitarian argument for veganism.
The utility of veganism isn't based on valuing the lives of livestock. It's based on either wanting livestock to not suffer (even if that means they don't exist), and/or attempting to optimise the planetary carrying capacity for humans (presumably as an adjunct to some form of birth rate promotion, as right at the moment we're not on track to reach even the people-eat-some-meat carrying capacity).
Personally, I assign the suffering of varelse a utility of zero. I wouldn't support crow, ape or orca farming, but I don't care about cows or chickens (or dogs or cats).
Would it not bother you if an acquaintance admitted to torturing chickens or cats for amusement?
That's not really a valid comparison, because the relevant factor there is that the acquaintance would be demonstrating seriously sadistic tendencies. Whereas people who eat meat don't do it because they get a kick out of animal suffering.
Killing for amusement is very different from killing for some utility (preferred food in this case). As a completely unbothered meat eater, who has meat for 60+% of my meals, I am very bothered by purposeless injury or death to animals.
It would bother me if they tortured toys like Sid in Toy Story.
Not in the general case. There are a couple of obvious subcases where it would bother me: 1) if they were stealing other people's chickens/cats to torture, 2) if they were doing it where other people had to listen (including me, in this case; it's at the very least annoying).
You can try the thought experiments on me if you want, but in all honesty I doubt I'll accept those either.
I think a lot of people would be bothered by such a thing for social, not moral reasons. I personally would be worried about it being evidence of sociopathy/psychopathy than anything. As other commentators have mentioned, it's the *amusement* that's the primary issue.
Yes, because animals and suchlike are obviously worth far less than people.
> you would need to attach extremely high utility to a single human meal and extremely low utility to an animal life
Cows provide more meals per animal than chickens. That's the "vegan harm reduction" case for eating beef over chicken.
If you mean "The serial killer includes their pleasure of killing you in their own utility calculation", that doesn't make sense. Obviously Tim would object to an agent pursuing a utility function sufficiently different from their own. That's like saying "As long as you're okay with a paperclip maximizer acting in accordance with the utility it assigns to making paperclips".
On the other hand, if you mean "As long as you're okay with including a serial killer's pleasure with the rest of your utility function", then certainly that would be the consistent utilitarian position. If the utility that the serial killer gets is greater than that lost by Tim (and others, as other people may experience distress as a result), then from a consequentialist utilitarian point of view, kill Tim is good. But utility is just another word for how good something is, so this is just saying "If killing Tim is an overall good thing, then killing Tim is good", which isn't much more than a tautology.
Actual response:
Of course you should consider your own happiness, but this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
Which is irrelevant because almost nobody is perfectly altruistic. Given that people are somewhat selfish, it is better for them to at least find the most beneficial / least harmful ways to be selfish.
Lots of people do because they weigh human suffering / pleasure at an enormously higher level than animal suffering / pleasure.
For instance, a QALY is typically £20,000 - £30,000 in the NICE calculations, which would value a life at something £1.6m - £1.8m (80 years) - or $2.27m - $2.55m. Let's say $2.5m to get a round number since we're only doing an estimate. Cows are valued at about £1500 a head, or about $2000 to keep our estimate consistent. That is, less than one thousandth the value of a human. There's no compensation schedule for negligently killing someone else's animal beyond the cash value (like any other property you destroy).
The market value is so low because most people don't care about animal suffering (other than pets). That value is the value of the flesh as food, not any sort of intrinsic value for the animal.
Caring about farm animal suffering puts you firmly into the societal minority. Now, not a very small minority (vegetarians and vegans are about 10% of the US population, and there are plenty of others who care but not enough to adopt that diet). But a minority nonetheless.
So yes, I think most people do believe that their pleasure in eating the food they like outweighs the suffering involved in factory farming.
> most people don't care about animal suffering
After reflecting on this for some time I think most of us have an aesthetic preference against animal suffering rather than a moral one. I hate to _see_ an animal suffer, but on the other hand I'm not going to get off my butt to actually do anything about the trillions of animals currently suffering outside my line of sight.
In my city (and I think in many others) there's vegan groups who occasionally stand around on the street challenging people to watch abattoir videos. They seem to be under the misapprehension that since I'd be disgusted to see animals getting slaughtered that I'm morally opposed to it. But they're wrong; I also don't want to see a video consisting of close-ups of people's buttholes pooping, but that doesn't mean I think pooping is immoral or should be banned.
this discrepancy could well be due to animal mistreatment -- especially that entailed in animal production, because most humans would and have act decisively to stop wanton torture of animals -- being normalised in our societies for historical reasons, whereas mistreatment of humans is not.
>on the other hand I'm not going to get off my butt to actually do anything about the trillions of animals currently suffering outside my line of sight.
The vast majority of people have exactly the same attitude about the hundreds of millions of people currently suffering outside of their lines of sight. To me this implies that morality is essentially a subset of aesthetics, albeit one that you're supposed to profess strong opinions about, often even to yourself.
I fully agree with this and I've been convinced this is the case since my early teens and I'm now middle-aged. Morality refers to the subset of aesthetics you feel strongly enough about to desire for others to submit to it as well.
In consequentialist terms an animal killing another animal is at least as bad as a human killing an animal (because animals are killed quickly in factories, but often killed more slowly and painfully in the wild). So why do I never hear about any vegan who wants to round up all the lions and feed them soylent in a zoo where they can't terrorize other animals?
This is a real concern for many people who care about animal welfare.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predation_problem
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wild_animal_suffering
Scott previously linked to a group that was actively researching wild animal suffering. (I don't remember whether they had identified any interventions that they considered worthwhile or not, but they thought it was important to study.)
In fact, this has led to some significant debates between animal rights advocates and environmentalists. Sometimes pretty acrimonious ones.
I think the main points in the other direction are non-consequentialist views that suffering is worse or otherwise has a different status when it is caused by a moral agent, and practical or theoretical arguments that we don't or are unlikely to have the capacity to do much about predation in the foreseeable future, in some cases without causing other bad unintended consequences.
Some people, including me, feel that it's obvious that at least in a hypothetical future where humanity directly controls all of Earth's ecology, we should definitely suppress predation.
I didn't notice, and we can't edit comments here, but there's already another part of this thread where this was briefly discussed
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2095967
including the name of a group that is researching this.
Are you saying that you (or people in general) would do something about it if it was a moral preference? I' not really sure about that. After all, people care about a lot of other things than their moral preferences.
>Of course you should consider your own happiness, but this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
Wait, what? Your model of "most people" is that most people think animal suffering outweighs their own happiness? I find that very implausible, considering that the vast majority of people eat meat and do not donate to effective animal charities. I'm only one person, but certainly I prioritize my own happiness over any possible number of suffering cows and chickens.
Do you think that people actually find this convincing as a moral argument, or just try to ignore it? Saying that people's behavior reveals that they don't actually care about animal welfare is like those economic arguments that smoker's behavior reveals that they don't actually care about cancer. It seems clear that people *do* care about these things, but this caring just doesn't manage to get a grip on their behavior, when confronted by something else they care about much less, but that is very immediate and therefore has a tight grip on their behavior.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/05/01/update-to-partial-retraction-of-animal-value-and-neuron-number/
Over 30% of Mechanical Turkers explicitly said cows were of zero moral value. 60th-percentile numbers (1000 cows = 1 human morally) are also consistent with eating cows (for reasonable QALY numbers), as 80 years of human life eating beef only requires 120 years of cow life (assuming cows are slaughtered at 3 years and a human eats 0.5 cows per year), and the 50th-percentile numbers (75x) aren't even that far off. There's also the questions of to what degree Mechanical Turk is a biased sample here - it's Internet-based - and of personal misestimation (some people would see low numbers here as representing a more enlightened mindset).
I think those numbers are consistent with eating cows only if you attribute 100% of human well-being to their cow-eating. If you take a very conservative over-estimate and assume that 10% of human well-being is due to eating cows, it looks like you wouldn't make it even at the 60th percentile, unless I've done my math wrong.
If you only need 120 years of cow life to have a lifetime of eating cow (and 0.5 cows eaten per person per year is high), then at 1000:1 you only need eating beef to add -1 * [factory farmed cow QALY] * 120 / 1000 QALY to a human beef eater.
If a perfectly healthy human is 1 human QALY per year, and a perfectly healthy cow raised c.1800 farming practices and slaughtered ethically is 1 cow QALY per year, the lowest a factory farmed cow would go is, say, -3 cow QALY per year.
-1*(-3)*120/1000 = 0.36 human QALY over 80 years, or 0.04 human QALY per year.
So eating beef is utility preference consistent if it improves your life by 4% for the most extreme reasonable assumption of factory farmed cow QALY, and note that many people would assign factory farmed cow QALY values closer to -1 (1.3% improvement consistent) or 0 (any improvement consistent).
For beef to be immoral, cows don't *just* need non-zero moral value. They need non-zero moral value AND to have negative QALY in factory farmed conditions, and even then the numbers matter.
Note that -3 is wild because it is asserting that a world with zero cows is better than a world with 74.9% cows raised in historical conditions + ethically slaughtered and 25.1% of cows factory farmed. I think some people who are suffering fixated think that's obviously true whereas that's crazy to me. I have a strong existence > non-existence bias, not to an unlimited degree but at the very least to the degree that factory farmed cow QALY is probably in the 0 to -1 range.
If cow happiness is worth 0.001x human happiness, factory-farmed cows are -1 QALY and enforced vegetarianism is 0.99 QALY (obviously for people who don't like meat this last one isn't true, but we're talking about the calculus for the people who do), then 80 years of enforced vegetarianism + 0 years of cow = 80*.99 + 0 = 79.2 total QALY, while 80 years of meat-eating + 120 years of farmed cow = 80*1 + 120*0.001*-1 = 79.88 total QALY.
(Indifference point for 1000x would be at cow life = -6.67 QALY and vegetarianism = 0.99 QALY, or at cow life = -1 QALY and vegetarianism = 0.9985 QALY; the former value for cows seems implausible and while the latter value for vegetarianism is certainly true for some people, there are definitely also people who like meat more than that.)
The ACC on eating meat ( https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ ) actually puts farmed cow QALY at +0.1, at which point this calculation obviously isn't going to favour vegetarianism.
EDIT: said 0.9983 when I should have said 0.9985, corrected.
Personally, I don't like meat, so I'm not planning to eat it regardless of whether it's morally permissible.
But since you are appealing to what "most people believe", I feel I should speak out as an example of someone not convinced that factory farming is more morally important than human dietary preferences. I've got 2 major issues:
1. I haven't been convinced by any particular position on the topic of population ethics (i.e. how to do moral reasoning about actions that change the number of people who will be born in the future). The obvious options run into clear problems (e.g. "the repugnant conclusion"). Without a way to handle population ethics, you could still argue that certain *kinds* of farming are better or worse, but I don't see a convincing way to argue that just flat reducing (or increasing) the total *amount* of farming is good or bad.
2. I am not convinced that cows and chickens are moral patients. Most appeals for their welfare seem to rely on evoking emotional reactions that I personally don't feel very strongly. I'm sympathetic to the difficulty of arguing this--I don't know how I would argue that *humans* are moral patients to someone who didn't already believe it--but this is a key axiom of the animal welfare movement, and it just doesn't resonate with me.
re 2, an argument for why animals have moral standing could be that (1) things can be good or bad for them, (2) they experience things as good or bad through their senses, in their consciousness, and (3) they are self-maintaining.
but really everyone should decide why they think humans have moral standing, and then see if that applies to (some of) the other animals too. i think many people who suspect animals don't have moral standing haven't really thought about why they think humans have moral standing.
Can you taboo "good/bad", "experience", "senses", and "consciousness" and then restate your criteria?
https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/rationalist-taboo
my argument is not actually my argument, it is christine korsgaard's argument (though i find it very convincing). i will try to explain how i understand it.
korsgaard develops her theory of value from aristotle. she makes the distinction between two kinds of good -- (1) something that is functionally good (bc it allows something to function well, e.g. a whetstone is good for a knife, thatch for a roof, food for humans) and (2) something that is good finally (the good life, the thing we find good for its own sake). she also argues that good is what she calls "tethered" -- that a thing is necessarily good _for another thing_. she then argues that the second sense of good is derived from that first sense, that the only reason anything is good at all is because there are creatures for whom things can be good, not the other way around.
to korsgaard, a core feature of living things is that they are self-maintaining -- that they take actions in the world to keep themselves well-functioning and reproducing. obvious examples include eating, drinking, sleeping, avoiding harm, procreating, etc. so in our acting to attain what is good-for us in the functional sense, we kind of take that thing to be good in the final sense, we elevate it in a way.
importantly, animals act based on information in the world (unlike the other animals, humans are aware of their reasons for acting, but that is not important in determining moral standing). what's more, in our representational system, this information appears to us in what she calls a "valenced" way, where perceptions motivate actions -- it is in this way that the functional and final goods appear to us.
i have not exactly tabooed the words here, but i hope that explains what is meant a little bit better.
=> https://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~korsgaar/CMK.HG.pdf
I'm not sure that did much to clear up your moral patienthood position for me.
Are self-healing materials moral patients? (They react to their environment in a way that tends towards self-preservation.) How about black holes? (Ditto.) I expect your answer is "no", but I also don't see how your criteria can exclude them except by saying something like "they have no consciousness/cannot perceive things", but then I want to know what consciousness/perception is, and how you tell whether a thing has it.
2 is pretty easily argued. Cows and chickens both have nervous systems capable of registering fear and pain. Cows likely have much more sophisticated emotions than that, due to them being large mammals that rear their young. I can understand your difficulty with chickens, but cows are large, social mammals and if you can accept dogs as moral patients(which they plainly are)I can't see how cows would be a stretch.
I actually find it odd that so many people argue animals aren't conscious agents, almost as if they were rocks that somehow moved, made decisions, mated, etc. All mammals have all the hardware for fear and pain, so it would follow that they are having a subjective experience of such.
Maybe it's because I live in Japan, and have heard people proudly declare that they have whale steaks in their freezer for later, but I find it strange that people default to assuming emotive, intelligent animal behaviours have no subjective experience behind them. As if a singing whale is singing in the way that a mimosa pudica plant moves its leaves. Maybe that's hyperbolic, but that does appear to be many people's basic attitude(though in the west, not towards whales, obviously).
I think you are suggesting that moral patienthood is implied by some combination of: fear, pain, sophisticated emotions, sociality, consciousness, agency, and/or subjective experience. Could you make that inference a little more explicit?
Sure, and speaking of inferences those are an essential part of my argument. We regard other human beings as moral agents of equal standing because we infer, based on a reasonable amount of evidence, that they are having a subjective experience wherein fear, pain, etc are felt, and wherein torture or suffering also limits future experiences of joy, happiness, pleasure. We use a multitude of evidence to make this inference: we hear a cry of pain and recognize it as similar to our own when we are having a pain experience. We can also point to certain structures in the brain and show that they are responsible for producing emotion in ourselves, and other beings with those same structures.
Many animals provide quite a large amount of evidence by which we can make the same inference. A dog cried out when kicked. Its brain has structures similar to ours, which produce states of fear, happiness etc. Obviously, these states are much less sophisticated than our own, but in so far as emotions are concerned, (and I think probably self-awareness as well, though that is less important in this argument) it is a difference of degree. Stating that animals aren’t moral agents worthy of any ethical consideration is throwing the baby out with the bathwater because yes, of course, their internal experiences can’t match the complexity of our own. But the fact remains that most animals, especially the mammals we like to eat, are not just putting on a show of being afraid, or feeling pain, like some 19th-century automaton. It’s quite reasonable to infer that something similar, though simpler than human experience is going on.
Sandro’s comment reply to AdamB states the problem well. Intellectual superiority doesn’t render the internal experiences of simpler minds ethically unimportant. My understanding is that your argument is based on the assumption that animals are glorified mechanisms, but science doesn’t really bear that out. Sometimes it seems like the prior “animals don’t think” is so strong in most people that even videos of octopuses solving puzzles through trial and error, elephants trumpeting loudly over the bodies of fallen family members, chimps doing any number of very smart things, do nothing to change their attitudes towards the factory farming situation.
You are discussing the inference from (direct observations of animals) --> (therefore, genuine fear and pain).
I wanted you to discuss the inference from (fear, pain, etc.) --> (therefore, moral patienthood). Why are those the criteria? Some humans can't feel pain; does this reduce their moral patienthood?
And you definitely do NOT understand my argument, because I haven't even made one yet; I only stated that I'm unconvinced.
But to give a better idea where I'm coming from, my current model of this topic is that most people subconsciously assign moral patienthood using a rule very close to "do I feel sympathy for it?" Most attempts to get people to support animal welfare look to me like they're basically just attempts to evoke sympathy. ("Things can be good or bad for them", "they feel fear and pain", "don't these baby pictures make you feel warm fuzzies?", "doesn't this nasty video make your mirror neurons cringe?", waxing poetical about animal emotions, etc.)
One philosopher I was assigned to read in high school actually argued this *explicitly*. He said something along the lines of "humans can at least vaguely imagine what it's like to be a drowning gopher, but I don't think we can imagine what it's like to be a tree whose roots are rotting; therefore the drowning gopher is morally significant but the rotting roots are not."
I do not reflectively endorse this standard. I think in some cases it is too narrow: If we ever encounter truly alien aliens, we might not be able to feel sympathy for them, but I don't think that automatically means they're not moral patients. In other cases I think it is too broad: Humans can feel sympathy for stuffed animals and fictional characters!
So I do not intend to be moved by statements that *merely* paint animals in a sympathetic light.
>if you can accept dogs as moral patients(which they plainly are)
Not plain to me.
So an interesting question then is: would you have the same objection if the cow were very carefully and painlessly put to death (and then eaten)? That is, the cow is led into a very pleasant slaughterhouse, spacious, clean, with whatever artwork is pleasing to cows on the wall of his chamber well-stocked with excellent grass. An hour later all the O2 in ths cow's chamber is replaced with N2, and the cow dies a peaceful and painless death, after which it is butchered.
Is this still a moral problem?
I think that solves a lot of problems for me. If animals raised for meat lived good lives that ended relatively painlessly in one bad day I would have much less problem with it.
What if I substitute "children born with Down's syndrome" for "cows" in the above paragraph?
It begs the question of any conscious being's right to take life, but for me, it makes the situation much much much less objectionable. I guess to put it simply, I think human well-being is more important than animal well-being, but not so much so that we can justify giant animal torture factories that kill 3 billion a day. But probably by enough to justify the situation you've described above.
That's interesting, thanks. One more: does the calculus change if we're talking about putting criminals to death? That is, does a genuinely painless method of execution reduce your objections to (or increase your support for) capital punishment?
I'm just trying to figure out what the driving moral principle is. I get the feeling it isn't *just* suffering, so I'm trying to figure out what else is in there, if you see what I mean.
There are other guiding principles than the pleasure or suffering of those affected by your actions. For example, you could make a stewardship argument: "it's wrong to factory farm animals, even if they weren't capable of suffering, because it's ugly and wasteful and humans have a moral duty to use animals as a resource wisely and efficiently." You could make a reflective moral case: "it's wrong to factory farm animals, even if they don't suffer, because in order to do it human actors need to act in ways that are callous or ugly and they may themselves become callous and ugly thereby, i.e. their work experience bleeds over into their life -- someone who slaughters cows all day becomes X% more likely to beat his wife than someone who grows tulips."
Most people don't actually make those arguments in the 21st century, but they used to be made more often in the past.
Seems worth noting that those arguments both appear to imply market failures. If there's a more efficient way to do farming, the farmers should adopt it voluntarily without consumers needing to pressure them into it. If the work is harmful to the farmers, you should need to pay the farmers extra to make them do it anyway, causing those harms to already be reflected in the price of the product. (Unlike harms to the animals, which are economic externalities because farmers don't need to get the animals' consent.)
I don't find market failures particularly implausible, but it seems like a serious development of these arguments ought to include an explanation of where and how these particular markets have failed to correct those particular problems on their own.
I'd also want to see empirical numbers for the efficiency and the bleed-over, if possible.
I think we're talking about different things. You're saying "once the human beings have these values, the market will reward processes that are consistent with those values," and I agree with that as a matter of principle.
But an ethical argument is about *setting* those values. You're trying to persuade umpty consumers that they should care about things like stewardship or a coarsening of their moral fiber, and should therefore use their consuming power to influence producers via the usual market mechanisms.
You could take the position (common in economics) that ethical values and utility functions et cetera are just inputs, things we assume exist and are fixed, and then we see how the market functions with these inputs. But I suggest that is not the field of ethics, which is about how we choose and change those ethical values and utility functions in the first place.
Your "stewardship" argument talked about "wastefulness" / "efficiency". The market rewards efficiency whether humans value it or not.
> this does not plausibly outweigh the suffering involved in factory farming. I don't even think most people believe it does.
I don't know, I think many people would have an intuitive picture where animal suffering has nonzero value but it's many orders of magnitude less important than the suffering of a "fully" intelligent animal.
Do these people actually *suffer* every time they eat a breakfast with no beef?
In the utilitarian calculus that equates foregone pleasure with suffering, yes, absolutely.
I mean, in my case I don't eat meat for breakfast (though I eat dairy at every meal), but I do feel unsatisfied if I go to bed and haven't eaten meat for dinner. Fish doesn't count, as far as I've experienced.
It's not as bad as going to bed without eating dinner at all, but maybe... 30% as bad?
Alright, I think I was wrong about this one...
This.
Also, relative health impact.
Although that point _also_ goes in the favor of chickens.
A couple of years ago myself and another SSC reader co-wrote an essay where we looked in absolutely exhaustive detail at every possible element that we could think of that could contribute to the moral calculus for a decision to eat meat or go vegetarian.
On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin, but that the question of what utility loss there was from abruptly switching from a meat to vegetarian diet was understudied.
We agreed that most vegetarians eventually stop caring that they can't eat meat (although noted that this could have been survivorship bias) so the impact on your lifetime utility of an abrupt switch was unlikely to outweigh other benefits accruing to you personally, such as slightly better health or slightly cheaper meals.
Speaking for myself now and not the output of the co-written essay, I reckon that could be why those calculations rarely appear in essays like the one spawning this comment section - nobody has studied it and the effects are actually pretty small compared to the impact of more significant elements of the moral calculus such as the one about how much / whether animals suffer and whether it greatly extends your life or whether that is a function of higher income / intelligence which is predictive of vegetarianism.
> On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin, but that the question of what utility loss there was from abruptly switching from a meat to vegetarian diet was understudied.
I'm not going to look at "the literature" to figure out how much I like eating beef, come on.
"On your particular question, we concluded that the literature strongly supported there being effectively no utility loss at all for switching from a meat to vegetarian diet at the margin"
What does "at the margin" mean in this context?
"We agreed that most vegetarians eventually stop caring that they can't eat meat (although noted that this could have been survivorship bias)"
Or cognitive dissonance, etc.
Oh apologies if that wasn't clear. We were referring to the study I link below where a group of US consumers in 2016 said they would pay around $15 a year to avoid a 1% decrease in their consumption of meat. If you were to multiply that by 100 to get a 100% decrease in meat consumption you end up at roughly $1500 a year which is very roughly what you save on groceries by going vegetarian so it nets out.
However we reasoned that you couldn't just multiply by 100 to get the WTP to avoid a 100% decrease, because there are some meat meals that people value far more than others (for example meat-containing airline meals are presumably ultra-low value, whereas culturally significant meat-containing meals such as thanksgiving turkey are presumably ultra-high value)
That's why I make such a performance about the 'margin' bit - the case for decreasing your meat consumption by a few percent (i.e. at the margin) seems very strong, because we can quantify what an average person is likely to think about that. The case for totally cutting meat out of your diet (i.e. not a marginal change) is harder to justify because the evidence on that sort of change is lacking, although just because it is harder to justify doesn't mean we can't say anything at all about it - it is just an uncertainty in our mental model.
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/agricultural-and-resource-economics-review/article/abs/some-economic-benefits-and-costs-of-vegetarianism/1C2CB85022A54F27504A7DA65576C5C4
The paper is slightly more complicated than I can summarise here (as it has been a while since I read it and I don't want to give you bad information), but the value approximately represents an elasticity of demand with respect to the price of meat at the margin. That is, the authors find the increase in the price of meat that would result in a 1% reduction in its consumption (holding the price of all other food constant) and then calculate the cash value that would have to be transferred to leave people no worse off than when they started once they'd reconfigured their consumption bundles, which is where they get the $15 from.
In the paper the authors motivate this by talking about a change in policy (such as might be put about by an imagined vegetarian government) but they clearly have a bit of an axe to grind - you should be able to derive exactly the same result just by considering a generalised price increase, such as might arise from a supply shock (like a hacking attack on a meat producer, for instance)
I don't think it's so much about differential quality of meals , as it is that cutting meat out entirely is entirely different from ordering a 12 oz. steak instead of a 16 oz. steak, or having waffles instead of a sausage biscuit for breakfast. For me personally, if I fast from meat for a meal, I don't even miss it. If I fast from it for a day, then by dinnertime I'm basically not enjoying food anymore and everything feels like an unsatisfying side dish while I'm left craving a main course.
Well, of course there's no loss of utility at the margins. If decreasing meat decreases utility, then presumably increasing consumption would increase utility, so they would keep increasing their consumption until the marginal utility is zero. That's how consumption works: if you assume rational behavior, for appropriate definition of "rational", everyone's marginal utility is, apart from discretization effects, zero for all gods they consume. People act to maximize their utility, and maxima are found where the derivative is zero. I quite possibly could be missing something, but this seems like a rather trivial claim.
Have you tried the Burger King “Impossible” Whopper? I’m no a beef expert but it seems pretty close to the real thing.
I like the "impossible" meat, but it's really not the same taste at all.
I'm a huge fan of Impossible meat. I'm glad a large chain like BK offers it, but I've got to say their version is pretty different from others I've had and doesn't really do the product justice. I definitely still like it and order it, and maybe that's just what you get from fast food, but I think people will be a lot more impressed by the similarity to meat if they order it somewhere else or cook it themselves. Also the grocery store price has been coming down quick!
Every thread on meat-eating attracts a lot of people whose assumption is "Well of course everyone knows animal suffering matters more than human health, happiness, and convenience, so much so that we don't even need to note that these decisions impact human health, happiness, and convenience"—while the 90% of us who eat meat are like, what the hell are you on about?
Well Scott is a utilitarian and takes utilitarianism for granted, and I suppose utilitarianism in the 21st century has decided to go this Singerian direction of denying human uniqueness.
I'm not a utilitarian, I'm as convinced of its falseness and pointlessness as I'm convinced of anything in this world, but I don't really mind, it's his show, I still find the discussion somewhat interesting. Just as if a Christian blog was debating the merits of Calvinism vs. Arminianism, I don't see the point in atheists showing up and asking "What the hell are you on about?"
"(Further, I would remind you all that each and every one of us in this space are likely 5-sigma deviants from normalcy on at least a few critical dimensions."
Five sigmas is one in three million. The US has a population of ~330m, so that would be 110 Americans. I'm pretty sure that there are more than 110 American readers of ACT. Allowing different dimensions allows some more wriggle room, but not much, especially since you said that we are 5-sigma in several dimensions.
Quick vocab question: is sigma the universal term for standard deviation of all distributions, or does it specifically imply the normal distribution? I thought the former, and human thought variation is probably a fat-tailed distribution.
I assume it's something people are already taking into account when they decide what to eat.
Your comment reminded me of one of the adversarial collaboration contest entries a few years ago. It has a spreadsheet where you can enter in all the different numbers (including personal benefit from meat eating) to calculate whether (according to your state of knowledge) eating meat is a net harm or not.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/
I've gone vegetarian in the last couple years, and indeed I have experienced a hit to my wellbeing because of it. I enjoy meat, and my meals have not been as delicious or as fulfilling since I've given it up. How much suffering is this? Not really that much. For example I'd have a very hard time taking seriously the idea that it's caused me as much suffering as even a small number of chickens' farm lives worth. At such a small price, it would not factor meaningfully into any of these kinds of calculations.
I am in the same position. For instance I do miss eggs, but the idea that I could get enough pleasure out of a single egg to outweigh 24 hours of suffering for a hen in a battery farm is crazy to me.
I'm not sure what needs to be written on a carton of eggs to make you comfortable, but in rural areas in the US there are farmstands where you can buy a box of eggs from chickens freely roaming around the barn near that farmstand, without any fences. I think they get locked up for the night and when the weather is very cold, but I can't imagine what kind of better life you might realistically want for them. Some of the owners of these farmstands might sell eggs at farmers markets.
If that looks good to you, maybe you don't have to skip eggs. Maybe you just have to figure out how to obtain that kind of eggs.
My parents have chickens in that exact environment. It's actually funny about going into the pen at night, because the chickens all go stand by the door when the sun starts going down and waiting to be let inside. For much of the day they wander around the yard pecking at the ground.
We eat a lot of the eggs.
"By framing everything in terms of this, people (or, at least, rationalists) are put in a position where they feel that their own preferences are invalid unless they can be justified on utilitarian grounds."
But utility is *defined* by preferences. Being bummed out by a loss of food choice is perfectly valid negative utility. Just not very much, in comparison.
Serious question - How do you measure subjective preferences in this manner? "Not very much" seems to be based on your internal preferences, rather than an objective outside measure that could encompass a statistically meaningful sample of humanity.
Yes I'm extrapolating an estimate about the average person from my own internal experience.
Of course that's non-objective and likely off by a factor, but the statement I justify with it doesn't strike me as especially strong, either. Being a factory chicken seems, for all we can know about the experience, orders of magnitude worse than, say, being a human with moderate depression. Of course, no way to verify.
There are two subjective calculations going on here, which can result in a very very different conclusion. The first is the subjective enjoyment of the meat. The second is our estimation of how much the animals enjoy/hate different types of existences.
I honestly doubt that insects have enough understanding of their existence to even classify enjoyment/misery. Kill as many as you like, and they don't seem to really understand or care. They die in masses very quickly anyway. Chickens are clearly higher level than insects, but having raised them and been around them all my life, I have my doubts that they understand much either. In my personal estimation, the subjective concern about these animals suffering is very low. Like, not worth worrying about from a moral perspective. (Dolphins, whales, and elephants are likely quite different from even cows, and definitely different from chickens).
I would personally be quite unhappy with a no-meat diet, and likely less healthy as well.
My internal calculation likely looks very different from yours, but comes out to "Eat as many chickens as you like, and pigs and cows too." I *might* feel bad eating a dolphin, don't know because I've never been in that situation. I'd feel bad about eating an endangered species (other than for literal survival), but mostly because I and other humans value the diversity of species, maybe for only aesthetic reasons.
A lot of the arguments around vegetarianism/veganism seem to take it for granted that the individual making the argument is speaking from a central/normal/universal mindset, and therefore their arguments are correct. I'm questioning that assumption directly, because my subjective feelings are very different.
> I have my doubts that they understand much either. In my personal estimation, the subjective concern about these animals suffering is very low.
I'll be relieved if you're right.
This seems like a great use case for having a functioning government. If there are really these kinds of moral and ecological costs to individual consumption choices, rather than push off the calculations and offsets of exactly what they are to individual consumers who are purchasing thousands of distinct items a year, reflect those costs directly in the price of goods via taxation that internalizes externalities like these.
Legislating morality is generally held to be a *bad* thing. There is a very solid argument to be made for incorporating the cost of environmental damage (although it should rightfully be taken at point of production rather than point of sale), but there is no analogous argument for uses taxes to incorporate the "moral cost." Fundamentally, we can either treat the chickens as deserving of legal protection - (and then don't imprison and slaughter them), or we can treat them as deserving partial protection (don't torture the poor things), or we can treat them as inanimate property. None of those spaces opens a clear legislative justification for, "well, you can torture that animal, but you have to pay Uncle Sam for the privilege." I'm not sure how one would even try to rationalize that choice.
That's fair and I think it also applies to considering moral cost individually. If you think your actions are causing widespread suffering to sentient creatures that deserve moral consideration, just stop doing those actions rather than seeking to offset the evil you're doing with good done elsewhere.
Simply forcing factory farms to not grossly mistreat animals would likely lead to some price increases, I suspect.
If it were the only option, everyone would complain for a while and then get used to paying slightly more for their humanely reared animal products. I can think of worse things than this.
Isn't many forms of welfare trying to solve a moral collective action problem?
In some cases you can make a practical argument for foreign aid or unemployment. But in Australia if you end up seriously disabled a lot of public money goes to ease your suffering. In a way that seems more to do with moral considerations.
Not necessarily. There are purely utilitarian arguments for things like disability insurance. It makes people more willing to undertake dangerous professions -- it used to be a big deal for coal miners' unions to negotiate good disability insurance. It prevents people from turning to socially costly activities (e.g. theft and fraud) if they have a problem earning a living honestly because of a disability. Plenty of people have argued for welfare with the second argument, in fact -- basically this is the point of view of people who say "school is cheaper than prison" (so e.g. we should subsidize education even for people who can't otherwise afford it, a version of welfare).
> There are purely utilitarian arguments for things like disability insurance.
Utalitarianism = morality
Yes, thanks for the correction. I mean "practical."
I know that "legislating morality" is a phrase that is used as though it's supposed to be a bad thing. But I really don't understand what it means. Isn't the *basic function* of government to "legislate morality"? Why do we bother with laws about property and murder if it's not to "legislate morality"?
I think it's clear that legislating something that one person claims to be morality while others strongly contest this is usually taken to be a bad thing, and then we forget that the things we morally agree on are still morality.
That's well put, although I think most people use the phrase "legislating morality" when they contemplate government legislating on things where any alleged perpetrator and any alleged victim are one and the same, e.g. legislating on gay marriage or smoking dope in your own house.
To bring it all back circle, in the case of veganism the alledged victim and perpetrator are definitefely not the same.
That seems to suggest that when people talk about "legislating morality", they very specifically *aren't* talking about utilitarian morality, but are only talking about theories of morality that *aren't* utilitarian.
Yes, that is correct, and I think reflects the way the phrase is most often used in the wide world. When people are talking about law and public order, I think they generally distinguish between actions that are "wrong" because they hurt other people and actions that are merely "not my style" because they only hurt yourself (and perhaps only hurt you morally or psychologically). It's often only the former that they consider within the ambit of the law, the latter are up to you, your conscience, and your God. (Although that is not universally true, there are plenty of people who consider actions that only hurt yourself to be within the reach of the law, because they consider government to have at least a slight loco parentis function -- it can legitimately act to improve the general public character, that is, people can say "What kind of moral character do we want to encourage?" and *compulsion* can have a role as well as persuasion or example.)
*Why* they use the word "morality" to refer to the actions that affect only your own utility I am not sure, except that perhaps they assume a stronger word would be used ("crime") if we were considering actions that harmed the public weal as well as the actor's. That is, "morality" is about how good or bad you feel about yourself, while "right/wrong/crime" are used to indicate measureable harm to others.
An interesting comparison can be made to the legal concepts of "crime" and "tort", where a tort is an offense against just one other person (who can sue you for damages) while a crime is an offense against the public as a whole (and which is prosecuted by the state in their name). Presumably people have a third category, which is an offense against just yourself, and it's this that they mean when they speak of mere "legislating morality."
Sorry, I forgot to add that, yes, I agree this cannot be all reduced to utilitarian calculus, where the subject/object distinction kind of fades away and we just tot up the total amount of harm without considering *from* whom it comes and *on* whom it lands. But I think most people are not utilitiarians in this way. They do assess the "what" but they also consider "who" and "to whom" in evaluating who is doing what to whom.
A similar effect can be seen in the concept of karmic justice, meaning people frequently assume that certain harms are less evil if the person to whom they happen "deserves" harm in some vague way -- is not a nice person, say, or is too lucky/privileged. Or they are more evil if the person to whom they happen is less "deserving" in some way -- is very nice, is young/cute/noble/has an inspiring life story. All of these are well outside the normal scope of pure utilitarianism, so far as I can see, but are an important part of how most people make ethical judgments.
Sincere question: what else should one base their legislation on? It seems to me that some form of morality will be at the bottom of whatever you try to legislate, but I'm happy to hear counterexamples.
No-fault divorce and a rebuttable presumption to shared legal custody of children, and a 50/50 division of assets, are probably examples of where people decided trying to have government settle the moral right-and-wrong questions in a divorce was either wrong a priori or practically too difficult.
The law that allows easements to be created by adverse possession is another case of practicality trumping moral righteousness, perhaps, as is the existence of the compulsory license in copyright law.
I would have thought of all of those as examples where morality tells third parties to butt out of individuals settling their own business.
Well, OK, I can see that for no-fault divorce, although I think in practice it actually comes from a feeling that the law cannot make the desirable moral judgments correctly. In practical fact almost no divorcing couple wants government to butt out of their business, what each partner *wants* is for the law (or by extension society) to reinforce their own moral judgment on the other party. That's why divorcing couples can indulge in absurdly self-destructive (if only financially) struggles to have the law "punish" the other party. So I think no-fault came about more because people despaired of getting the law to punish the right party 100% of the time -- that is, it was practical, not moral, motive. But I agree *some* people supported it because their moral judgment was "butt out, this is a mostly private affair." But even then, you are extending "the basis of legislation" from the Legislature to the hearts of voters, which is a bit of a stretch.
With the easements and compulsory licenses, I'm entirely failing to see how these can be rooted in a moral "butt out" attitude.
I agree with most responders that, in some sense, the point of law is exactly to "legislate morality", and that's what our laws actually do. I think the term "legislating morality" in its normal usage is actually a denunciation of legislating *my or your* morality over others. We want to legislate a morality arrived at collectively through some reasonable process. This brings us back to the OP: Is the problem really a non-functional government, or is the problem that we have a populace that would not vote for this proposal?
That's a good point - if 90% of the population eats meat, it seems very unlikely that a "ban meat" law would reach 50%+1 and actually pass.
I would frame it more along the lines of "the point of law is to supplant morality", i.e. set up a framework of rules that are to be abided by regardless of their moral valence. I see deontology mostly as an attempt to sidestep morality in precisely this way so as to be suitable for any organised society with a high enough population or a high enough level of complexity. If we could trust people to use their moral sense to behave well (by whatever standard you might chose) and to align enough to avoid conflict we would need no law.
It sounds to me like you're talking about law and deontology as ways to reduce the individual complexity/effort of aligning behavior, whereas I'm talking about law as the mechanism for *enforcing* the alignment of behavior.
These are two, separate aspects of law, so I think your point is more discussing a separate aspect of law rather than reframing it, per se.
I bring that up because it means your point about law supplanting morality may be true, in terms of taking the burden of moral calculus off of individual citizens, but it doesn't contradict the idea that law is *enforcing* a morality. Law gives us guidelines for how to behave, so those guidelines are predicated on some conception of how we *ought* to behave, and if you call that conception a "morality", then we have law enforcing morality.
Tl;dr: While your point may be correct, I don't think it negates the idea that law is legislation of morality.
On a separate issue: You have a cool point about deontology as some kind of decentralized replacement for law. That sounds pretty plausible to me.
I agree with your distinction here. My comment wasn't meant as a direct refutation of the original claim, I mostly wanted to reframe it so as to underline my point of law (partly) having the function of supplanting private morality.
It's entirely true that drafting a law ultimately must be done based on moral considerations but once the law is in effect we can only hope it abides by any reasonable moral principles since we have to follow it either way.
Yes, my reading of the categorical imperative can probably fairly be summarised as "a decentralised or distributed replacement for, or sense of, law". It seems to me that Kant's whole project (and one of the key points of that whole German philosophical tradition) was to merge or equate "morality" and "law".
Have you accounted in your suggestion for the public choice constraints the government faces? The individual bureaucrats and politicians running the government Consumption Choices Board (or whatever) doesn't know people's individual preferences (which should be an input to your individual decisions), doesn't have an advantage over individuals in terms of knowledge to the extent of providing just the "right" size of externality off-setting witness the history of the federal food pyramid, the closest thing the Feds have done for something like this), and is much more likely to be cutting deals with concentrated industry interests (who will of course supply the justifications) over how much to tax various goods than they are to create some sort of idealistic scientific-based inquiry. That'll just be the veneer.
It'd be nice to have an editor to re-insert things like accidentally deleted parenthesis, but oh-well...
I agree having a perfect government that solves all problems correctly would relieve us of the necessity of worrying about problems on our own. Right now the actual government's main intervention in this space is subsidizing factory farming, so we're out of luck.
Your calculus is different I think, too. You're a public figure. You're not only directly compensated for doing this kind of research and analysis when you publish it on Substack, but you have the platform to influence behavior well beyond your own and make much more of a meaningful impact than a consumer who only makes choices for themselves. That makes the cutoff point at which the cost of engaging in this kind of exercise is no longer worth it much higher for you.
Well, it would be a good case for having a functioning government as long as "functioning" met your exact definition -- that is, as long as it taxes the phenomena you see as externalities. But what if it decides that your not going to church every Sunday is a massive externality, because the lack of prayer is what is causing hurricanes, epidemics, and the decline in work ethic among the young -- so you will need to be paying hefty taxes if you choose not to go? Or what if it decides that miscegenation is a terrible externality, because mixed race children are deeply unhappy, and so it decides to penalize mixed-race marriages with steep taxes? But it does those things very efficiently and effectively, so according to some people it is "functioning" very well indeed.
It's the risk we take having a government. It can do things we don't like. I specified government because it is the only actor out there with the power to unilaterally raise prices of arbitrary goods, but in the general case where individuals are overwhelmed with choice paralysis and want to offload option evaluation to a trusted third party, there are other options. This is effectively the purpose served by Give Well, Consumer Reports, Rotten Tomatoes.
An organization that can make recommendations but cannot raise prices won't be able to shape behavior as effectively as a government, but it may be a better option if the government can't or won't do anything or we just don't trust it enough.
No, government can do things *you* don't like, but by definition it does not do things *we* -- in the sense of a majority of eligible voters -- don't like. What I'm pointing out is that it's always wise to consider how often you will be in the majority, and how much fun it will be to be in the minority if you have (at some previous point) endorsed the proposition that what 50% of the voters + 1 can make you do anything they want.
Precision isn't accuracy. The numbers cited for ghg are laughably inaccurate, though stated with precision. This is why economists are always so wildly mistaken. They take numbers someone pulled out of their butt and run them through a formula that is utterly unrepresentative of the system.
reading "economists are always so wildly mistaken" makes me wonder "compared to what?"
what alternative approach(es) do you *always* prefer for attempting to answer the kinds of questions economists try to answer?
Chicken bones. Oh no wait...given the post, beef bones.
Denoting initialisms with capital letters improves readability.
For the curious, I went ahead and looked it up:
"ghg" = "GHG" = "greenhouse gas"
Banned for one week for calling something "laughably inaccurate" with no evidence, then generalizing to say an entire field is "always" wrong.
What do you feel about the mouse plague argument against vegetarianism (particularly relevant since there's a mouse plague currently ongoing in Australia)? https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/scienceshow/mice-the-biggest-losers-w-vegetarianism/4660498
This is an argument against Australian wheat specifically, but more generally there are clearly harms to animals from row-crop agriculture....as a vegetarian I don't quite know how to feel about this. (if you are an omnivore using this as a whataboutist argument, I hope you are already avoiding farmed meat other than grass-fed beef!)
I don't think this article is a compelling argument against vegetarianism at all. It contains a kernel of important truth - basically everything we do has costs, especially to the natural world, and extra-especially to its most delicate elements, and we should all be conscious of them - but to extend that into saying "well everything is at least sort of bad, so just do whatever you want" is prima facie absurd.
I haven't checked the numbers, but i vaguely remember that the amount of grains consumed by the cow before it became beef per calorie of beef is greater that the amount of grains per calorie when consumed directly by human. If so, then mouse plague consideration is an argument for vegetarianism, not against it.
100% this is not an argument in favor of animal agriculture as currently practiced! But if we are already talking about indirect and uncertain effects like climate change, I don't see how you can wave away other indirect and uncertain effects like mass mouse death. And maybe that changes the conversation from beef vs chicken to, like, row crops vs tree crops.
It seems odd to call this an "argument against vegetarianism".
Fair enough!
"the amount of grains consumed by the cow before it became beef per calorie of beef is greater that the amount of grains per calorie when consumed directly by human" That seems obviously true on thermodynamic grounds.
It's a little more complex than "obviously", given that at least some calories cows get are from pastureland that doesn't have grain agriculture. But I think that for anything other than full free-range grass-fed cows, it is obvious.
Switching away from meat apparently *reduces* crop requirements, as so many animals are inefficiently fed so much human-edible food: https://ourworldindata.org/land-use-diets "Less than half – only 48% – of the world’s cereals are eaten by humans. 41% is used for animal feed, and 11% for biofuels."
At our current margin that's very true. But at the same time there's a lot of land that's suitable for grazing but not for growing crops due to lack of water. Also we can feed blemished food to pigs. From that perspective the ideal amount of animals raised isn't zero, though it's far lower than current levels.
That doesn't seem like an argument for or against either veggie or omni... I simply can't imagine a world in which mass monocrop grain production would cease. It's more or less mandatory to sustain the current global population. Even a very large movement toward vegetarianism - say tripling in the US from 5% to 15% - would only result in a marginal decrease in monocrop production of wheat/corn/etc.
There are tree crops with higher calorie per acre yields and fewer inputs than cereal grains and even legumes -- I agree that decreasing monocrop cereal and legume production significantly seems unlikely, but if doing so had 10x the animal-welfare benefits of quitting chicken, it seems like something that would be relevant to the discussion.
For instance, mature chestnut stands can approach the calories per acre of corn, and chestnut finished pork is a delicacy. It's plausible that if you live in Australia and value avoiding mouse death at some nonzero level, switching your chicken consumption to chestnut-finished pork is better overall than replacing with a more grain-heavy diet.
Again -- not an argument in favor of animal ag as currently practiced, I myself am a vegetarian, but to me the whole rest of the agricultural supply chain deserves more scrutiny, not just the bit where you kill and eat a farm animal.
Well, I do love chestnuts!
Growing a whole lot of (i.e.) chestnut, jackfruit, and cassava seems like a sensible thing to replace some portion of monocrop grains, but expecting people to voluntarily replace bread and masa seems *very* optimistic. We can see in modernizing countries today that as incomes rise, people switch from crops like yams or taro to more wheat and corn, and also eat more beef.
As a side note, mass rodent and bird death is also a normal part of grain production in the US. Estimates vary and it's not "mouse plague" level but it's probably millions/yr.
I think all of this makes a lot more sense if you add in "and of course, you're already spending some amount of money to do good in the world, however large or small that amount may be".
Assuming you're being efficient with that money, it kind of obviates the Yog-Sothoth problem. You have already chosen to donate/spend/forgo a certain amount of money, and that implies a certain price at which you're willing to purchase goodness for the world.
Decisions like whether to eat chicken will be priced appropriately; since you're already donating to the Stop Yog-Sothoth Fund, you are indifferent about whether to donate a marginal dollar, so if eating chicken is really worth a dollar to you, it must also be worth destroying a galaxy. Because that's your BATNA! That's what you would've done with that dollar otherwise (approximately).
In other words, the Yog-Sothoth thing is only confusing because it posits a world where you can save a galaxy for a dollar, care a lot about galaxies, don't care a lot about dollars, and are still somehow not already donating more.
I'm actually sort of disappointed nobody else jumped to this answer, since I think it's the "obvious" economist's answer to the puzzle.
I sort of get what you're saying, but I don't think it interacts very well with actual human reasoning. Cf. Peter Singer's example of the person who would ruin a $100 coat to save a drowning child, but isn't currently sending all of his money to child-saving charities.
I think this might prove that you should donate X% of your money to the most effective charity you know about, and then not care about ethics at all in any other facet of your life. Which I can't prove is wrong! But which seems unrealistic.
I think this is a bit too strong: at most it says that you should take ethical action yourself when it's easier for you to do so than to pay someone else to, and then donate X% of your money to effective charity as your contribution to society. This seems pretty reasonable, and is essentially how I've read you on effective altruism. You should still probably call your grandma, not shoot fireworks at your neighbors houses, not torture animals etc., those are expensive and impractical offsets.
It's certainly reasonable to think that people would be more likely to forgo $1 of pleasure to avoid summoning Yog than to pay $1 to unsummon Yog, but I think the Singer example is deliberately exaggerated (deliberately by him, not by you). Watching a child drown is horrifying and traumatic in a way that not paying attention to children dying far away is not. I'm not sure that there's such a large difference in action vs inaction in contexts where the consequences of actions are easy to ignore: the number of people avoiding palm oil/Xinjiang cotton etc. doesn't seem dramatically larger than the number of people giving money to environmental or human rights charity organizations. At least, not by the same margin as hypothetical child savers vs effective altruists.
Also, if there's such a big active vs passive distinction here, isn't this an arbitrage opportunity? Shouldn't someone start selling Yog-free chickens for $1.50 extra and make a ton of money?
This is another problem I have with utilitarianism. I described it in a piece I wrote earlier. (https://parrhesia.substack.com/p/utilitarian-action-coupling)
You get counter-intuitive conclusions when you cluster supererogatory and obligatory actions together. If eating animals is morally similar to murder, then this sort of utilitarian offsetting is morally puzzling. Can I commit a murder and then donate to prevent murders? Commit an assault and donate enough to offset it? What if I donate enough to save 10 lives through effective charities, can I then murder someone and be considered a morally good person? It seems like morality does not work that way.
Well strictly speaking utilitarians say that it is not OK to save 10 lives and then murder one person because this sequence of actions is morally inferior to the sequence of actions where you save 10 people and then don't murder the extra one (unless of course you are in the situation where you can only save 10 people by murdering the extra one, in which case it is clearly OK to murder one person in order to save 10).
The weirdness comes into utilitarianism due to the better known problem of it being unreasonably demanding of its adherents. If utilitarians who cared about animal welfare really followed utilitarianism to the extreme and they thought that a chicken life was worth more than $6, they would donate all of their available money to effective animal charities and also not eat any meat. The weirdness comes in when very few people are actually willing to spend all of their disposable income on charity and instead spend some of it on themselves. You then end up with weird situations where they can make deals with themselves whereby they can donate more to charity in exchange for doing something morally dubious but have a situation whereby the outcome is better by both their personal standards and the world's standards. This clearly isn't the optimal set of moral actions, but it is perhaps better than what they would have done otherwise.
The relevant comparison that I lay out in my post is (do nothing) < (kill 1, save 2). This seems crazy though. Your preference ordering (save 10, kill 1) < (save 10) makes sense.
I don't think it's crazy (though coupling those actions unnecessarily would be), and you would have to be very very careful that you weren't ignoring other effects.
But how is this any different from the standard trolley problem? You either do nothing, causing 2 people to die due to inaction or you switch the tracks causing one person to die through your actions.
It seems crazy because if you knew someone personally who donated $6000 to a good well charity and killed their ex-wife, you wouldn't consider them morally superior to the average person.
I don't see it as analogous to the trolley. I'm clustering two actions and ranking it compared to doing nothing. So it's not murder v. letting day. It's murder + saving v. doing nothing.
The point is that by pure utilitarian standards neither the person who donated $6000 and killed their ex-wife nor the average person is very good. Both of them are letting a lot of people who they could have saved die. Things only become unintiutive when you allow for people not donating nearly enough to charity as they ought to.
Saving someone is the same thing as not letting someone die. You could equally well describe the trolley problem as do nothing vs. pull the lever, saving two people but killing one.
That is not the point that I'm trying to make. I'm making the argument that from a utilitarian perspective, the murderer is better and that is very counter intuitive. I think that is an error.
Utilitarianism further has a problem where letting die is equivalent to murder and that is counter intuitive as well. I think that is incorrect. The trolley problem constructs a scenario that makes killing and letting die as similar as possible. Would you condemn the action of killing a child as morally equal to not donating about $3200 to an effective charity? No of course not. So it seems like an error in the theory to me.
You mentioned earlier the problem of moral obligation that is really strong but never adhered to. I think that is counter-intuition as well.
I see all as issues for the theory.
The utilitarian will agree with the intuitive judgment if you're in the real world, because in the real world, the kind of person that kills their ex-wife tends to do lots of other directly brutal things, and either donating to charity or not doesn't usually correlate very strongly with other behaviors that make lives better or worse. It's only in the very tight confines of a thought experiment where you've stipulated that the people are in fact otherwise identical that the utilitarian will judge the one person better than the other, and this is no longer counterintuitive, because we have no intuitions about extremely weird cases like that.
Intuitively, the person who donated $6000 and killed their ex-wife seems worse, but why would we give that intuition any weight once we've examined the situation? If the donation indeed saved more lives than they took, would it have been better if they had done neither? I don't think so - it's better to save more lives in net.
Though the magnitude of the real-life benefit of donations is more uncertain, and they don't viscerally feel like they're doing a lot of good. So even large donations to effective charities might not feel on par with something like pulling some kids out of a burning building.
So let's compare it to that. You know someone who ran into a burning building with their ex-wife, pulled two children out from under a collapsed beam, pushed the ex-wife into the smoke to her death, and ran out carrying the kids. Assuming the kids would've died otherwise, is this better than if he had stayed outside? I think it is.
The more common thought experiment for what you're describing is the surgeon who kills a single patient and harvests all the organs to save nine others, or some number larger than one.
Typically, nobody says this would be okay, but why on strictly utilitarian grounds? Assuming the practice is widely known to occur, it could have a chilling effect where nobody ever voluntarily seeks medical treatment, but to one surgeon making the decision in private, reasonably certain no one will ever find out, it's hard to see why they shouldn't be killing patients and harvesting their organs.
Your example is obvious, the murder is wrong because you can do both - not-murder and donate to save lives. Neither precludes the other.
But in the animal welfare example, at least as considered above, the actions do preclude each other. Though they do so because they're framed that way, "if we're going to eat one meat or the other, which should we eat?".
The obvious resolution is less of both, less chicken and less beef. But staying within the framework above of one or other and not less in sum, the utilitarian calculus seems appropriate.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/28/contra-askell-on-moral-offsets/
I don't understand the justification for the distinction between morality and axiology. Can you provide an explanation how these would differ under utilitarian thinking?
Utils are weighed. You come first, then your family, then your friends, then your community, city, province, country, civilization, species, class, and kingdom. So utils for you and your friends are worth waaay more than utils for cows or dolphins, which are worth more than chickens, which are worth more than invertebrates.
It's totally arbitrary, and everyone stands on their own moral perspective. The point is to build a society, and use that to define morality. Function and economics should take the lead.
Morality doesn't work that way because humans aren't utilitarians. A society reliably* running on this principle *would* work better than ours.
* preventing net negative utility from psychological costs, cheaters, unfavorable incentives, etc
Maybe it would, but members of that soicety wouldn't resemble humans in the slightest.
I don't understand why I should take the concept of superrationality seriously. To me, it seems based on an obvious category error. As per the wikipedia article linked in the post:
"The idea of superrationality is that two logical thinkers analyzing the same problem will think of the same correct answer."
The category error is in the statement that a game like the prisoner's dilemma has a correct answer and has wrong answers.
Perhaps I am leaning too much on the "correct/incorrect" wording used on the Wikipedia article, though.
Don't get caught up on "correct/incorrect". That isn't the key. "Superrationality" is about excluding a set of possible answers, where you are more intelligent and rational than the other players. You can imagine a "solution" to the Prisoner's Dilemma, where you always defect, but your opponent is naive and stupid, and always cooperates. That's a great solution for you! But it assumes your intellectual superiority over the other player.
Superrationality prohibits those "solutions". Instead, your opponent in the game must be expected to be just as intellectually capable as you are. Which means that, for whatever reason you decide to chose some action in some game circumstance, they would also decide to choose the same action for the same reasons. So it is searching for an equilibrium solution, where all players run the *same* strategy (for the same reasons).
Chicken suffering has no moral weight, on the grounds that chickens are assholes and deserve it.
That implies eating chickens provides negative moral weight, not zero. So by eating chickens, you can actually offset eating some amount of beef! So what chicken:cow ratio do I have to eat to get at zero?
Seconded
Quite right. I feel more moral compunction about setting a rat trap in my cupboard than I do about eating a chicken.
Unless I'm missing something, wouldn't you want to consider the price difference between beef and chicken? I'm sure it depends where you live, but generally I expect to pay something around 20% more for beef than chicken at a restaurant, and more than that at the grocery store. Without calculating, I expect the savings from purchasing chicken will be significant and likely enough to offset the more expensive moral cost of chicken (assuming you use the savings for that purpose).
I was thinking the same thing, but I think you could argue that the price difference corresponds to a difference in satisfaction, and that if one were to switch to the less satisfying option, one should offset that by spending even more on some other satisfying form of consumption, so in the end one would be paying more for the same amount of utility.
Yeah, but we were working with 250,000 calories of meat per year, so I figure we would be working with the base assumption that the meats are otherwise equal to the buyer, however price is a definite and significant difference (other comments have pointed out that this misses possible pleasure / heath benefits of beef vs. chicken, but these factors do vary among individuals).
I suppose the point is to help guide one's meat choice decision on an ethical basis, beyond factors that are already being considered like price/health/taste.
I agree we should probably assume that they are equal. I think the form of that assumption should be that the price differential is exactly cancelled out by a satisfaction differential, so that we can ignore both price and satisfaction in the ethical calculation. I think this assumption makes sense for small changes to one's diet (say switching from 55% beef to 45% beef) but is questionable for larger changes, where decreasing marginal utility would kick in.
I think that assumption works well if those are your preferences! :)
My concern would be that if someone finds chicken and beef roughly equal in taste (I fall in this category) and is willing to spend the same amount on each, the conclusion is that we should eat chicken over beef for moral reasons. This is the opposite of Scott's conclusion, and the change in the assumption is relatively minor.
This is a good point. Cost is a huge factor.
Beef is $5-10 per pound, depending on the cut.
Beyond Beef = $10/pound
Chicken or pork = $2/pound
Tofu = $1/pound
Eggs = $1.50/dozen
Beans = $0.50/pound canned, cheaper dried
Vegetarian sources of protein are generally cheaper. But, if you value the unique satisfaction and deliciousness of meat too much to give it up completely, the market is powerfully pushing you towards chicken or pork rather than beef or fake beef.
I think the assumption that causing a chicken/cow to be killed is worse than causing that chicken/cow to never come into existence in the first place needs to be examined. If the opposite were found to be true, we might instead conclude that we need to eat as many chickens as possible in order to maximize the number of chicken lives lived.
Which is worse, murdering a person, or deciding not to have kids?
Depends on who you ask. In other words, don't ask Mormons, Orthodox Jews, or high-jati Brahmins.
I'll put it another way. My sister and her husband have decided not to have a fifth kid. Is that decision as bad as eating the fifth kid?
And just like I said previously, it really does depend on who you ask. There are people that would say "yes...it's as bad as eating the fifth kid".
Clearly, eating a child is not morally equivalent to not having a child. There exist an extremely rare group of people that would say yes but Bullseye is appealing to the general intuition.
That group may exist, but I don't think it includes Mormons or Orthodox Jews. (I know very little about Brahmins.) Maybe the Quiverfull movement?
I really don't think there are many people that would say that, even in the groups you mentioned. The average Mormon apparently has <4 kids, which is higher than the US average but well below the maximum possible number of children. I assume they'd be more appalled by someone eating one of their children than by someone not having children.
What *answer you get* depends on who you ask. But that doesn't mean what is *worse* depends on who you ask. I find your answer rather misleading and unconstructive.
"Worse" is a value judgement and it is dependent on who you ask. If you ask an orthodox follower of certain aspects of the Kevod Hatzibbur than it's actually worse than eating your child as "a man and woman, an infertile man and woman, are like a page ripped from the torah" (BT Megil, iah24b)
Some mormon fundamentalist sects consider ANY waste of sperm to be an abortion (including wet-dreams) and any oral sex is prohibited because your wife could literally be eating your kids.
So no, I disagree with your assessment. Some people you might ask may think not having kids, and in myriads of forms of not having kids, is like tossing the torah in the fire or eating millions of unborn babies.
If people did in fact consider non-procreation worse than murder, we would expect people to argue for the death penalty for non-procreation, like people do for murder. I'm under the impression that this does not happen very frequently.
Where is this quote from "a man and woman, an infertile man and woman, are like a page ripped from the torah"? I see nothing like this in BT Megillah 24b
> "Worse" is a value judgement and it is dependent on who you ask.
I think the idea that all value judgments are subjective is pretty controversial. Most philosophers of ethics are in fact moral realists, for instance.
Where did you get that quote? Nothing remotely like it appears on Megilla 24b. But I can say that it is obvious to any orthodox Jew that being mevateil a lav, nullifying a positive commandant (such as having children), is nothing compared to a yehareg v'al yaavor, a commandment that you must die rather than violate, such as murder, whatever hyperbolic statements you can find about the importance of having children aside.
Where do you see that those people would answer anything other than the obvious "murder is way worse"?
Personally I would prefer being killed at some point in the future to never having existed at all. The question is if chickens/cows feel the same way.
well, you would have to be able to somehow ask yourself that same question but having grown up and spent all of your (unnaturally brief) life in a factory farm, perhaps (if you are a chicken) never having seen the sun.
Yes, that is indeed the question. Would a chicken, if he could speak German, say that he has a lebensunwertes Leben? Would a chicken choose euthanasia/suicide given the opportunity?
to make this claim fairly would require some type of rawlsian "veil of ignorance". because you already exist, you'll naturally have a predilection towards existence. you would have to show an unbiased "possible you" prior to existence what existence would look like and let that "possible you" compare that state of existence to a state of non-existence.
i'm not definitely asserting that "possible you" would have a different answer, but it's also quite impossible to assert from your present position an unbiased set of intuitions.
I think the idea of making decisions without existing is absurd, even as a thought experiment. Cogito; ergo sum. So I think that, instead, we should look at revealed preference, which shows suicide to be rare, even under harsh conditions.
If that were the case, eating chicken wouldn't become the best option, because instead we could pay for a farm to raise lots of chickens in a way where they don't suffer.
"...in a way where they don't suffer."
I'm going to need to see conclusive and hard evidence of that and even more important a very good and specific while simultaneously broad definition for your concept of "suffering".
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/22651679/
That may be the case, but when choosing between eating a cow and eating 160 chickens, we might conclude that we should choose the latter in order to give those 160 chickens a shot at life.
Can't you eat the cow *and* subsidize the chicken lives?
Only if you assume that you have extra resources you don't mind spending.
Generally these arguments aren't about the killing of the animal, but the raising of them. According to the reasoning, buying meat is wrong principally because you cause a farm to raise another animal in conditions of suffering. So it's actually an assumption of the argument that a life sufficiently full of suffering is immoral to bring into existence. To carry out your argument, I think you'd need to undermine that premise and convince people that the existence of creatures is good in and of itself, independent of suffering.
I don't see any reason that the burden of proof should be on the side questioning the assumption that chicken lives and cow lives are not worth living.
Sorry I didn't mean the burden of proof is on you, I'm just saying that that's where the argument is. It's not killing vs not-living; it's life-of-suffering vs not-living.
Oh, sorry about the misunderstanding. Any ideas on how the issue could be investigated? To me it seems intractable.
Right, I don't know if there's a good answer. Each side takes their stance as something like an axiom, so it's hard to see how to come at it via argumentation.
If we are doing a utilitarian calculus and incorporating animal suffering and death, then it is not clear to me that hastening the demise of human life is not a net increase in utility. Currently, around 3 billion animals are killed daily and billions more live in inhumane conditions. So in 3 days, there have been more animals killed than humans alive. If climate change accelerated the death of all humans, then couldn't this plausibly be a utility increasing good thing if it ended factory farming?
I do not believe in utilitarianism and I am not vegan but I am sympathetic to these arguments. However, when you put them together, it seems like it is better to kill all human beings alive. Can someone explain to me the error in my reasoning if it exists?
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0020174X.2019.1658631
I'm a utilitarian and very very vegan-sympathetic, so I think I'm qualified to answer your question.
I think a big factor here is the future potential to be a net-positive society. That is to say, even if we're in the red today, our best option is to try and work toward a world where that's no longer the case.
This isn't *necessarily* wishful thinking. If humanity doesn't totally wipe itself out at any point, and advances in technology allow us to expand our total population, the future could contain ~some very high number of humans and other sentient beings who experience much more positive utility and much less negative utility than we do. If that's true, then it's "worth" enduring all the negative stuff now to try and achieve that future.
(Sidenote: If you really want to kill all humans, accelerating climate change is not a great way to go about it. That probably just causes resource scarcity, international, tension, and wars, which usually don't kill *all* humans. Killing *all* humans is really hard, which might be one reason utilitarians don't try to go for it.)
Very interesting. I respect this response a lot because it provides a true solution and not just a work around. How good is the solution? I would have to think a lot about it because this possibility is far from certain.
There's a lot of anthropologists and others who argue that most of human history was far worse for most people than pre-agricultural pre-history. However, many of these people still think that human life in the past century or two is far better than pre-agricultural life, so that the net result of agriculture has been positive, even though it was net negative for many centuries (and millennia).
The hope is that even if we are still in fact net negative when we consider factory farming, we might still get net positive. I think this all requires much more empirical investigation.
i'm partial to this argument and i've heard it stated in various ways before.
however, are we really depriving future individuals who haven't existed of a good existence? they aren't ever going to be present to lament the opportunity cost of being denied a good existence. meanwhile, there are presently countless individuals suffering violently. to cease existence for all would end that while not imposing any real threat to the Not Yet Born.
i'm of course not an advocate for the genocide of our planet, i'm just trying to take the above argument at its best and see where that leads us.
I admit that questions about the "rights" of nonexistent entities can be strange and counterintuitive.
I'd say the issue with the extinction route is *not* that it deprives particular hypothetical future people of their existence and "causes them suffering" in some weird counterfactual sense. The problem is that it results in a universe with no people in it (a "net zero" on the utility scale), as opposed to a universe where ~trillions of people get to lead net positive lives (a very high positive on the utility scale). The problem isn't the lament over nonexistence - it's the nonexistence itself.
So I would support humanity "sticking it out" for the same reason I support anything else with a delayed payoff.
(As far as stuff like the Repugnant Conclusion goes, I'd use something like the thought process Scott goes through in section five of this essay: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/08/24/the-invisible-nation-reconciling-utilitarianism-and-contractualism/ )
I don't think there is an error in this reasoning. It's at least one reason people are concerned about future AI causing human extinction. More typically in the circles of people surrounding Scott, the concern is they'll be programmed with a naive objective function that optimizes for something amoral that inadvertently leads to human extinction. But it's also possible they're programmed perfectly and their objective function tells them the world will be better off without humans and that will be correct.
The objection from a human is just hey, I'm human, and I don't care about the non-human world being better off. The good of my own species is infinitely more important than the good of all other conceivable sentient beings, not for any rational or utilitarian reason, but just because.
Utils need to be biased to make sense. There's no point making everyone else happy if you get screwed over. It's not a human morality. You, your family, your country, and your species get first claim on utils.
It's the trolley problem. Your brother on one side, two randos on another. The good human will save his brother and kill five randos. This is morally acceptable.
The person who refuses to save his brother is a heartless jerk.
Assuming that the choice is "factory-farmed chicken" or "some kind of beef, I dunno, normal beef I guess" weakens this argument, although it also helps keep it simple. The 30-days-of-horror life lived by a factory chicken is indeed so horrible that I (an omnivore) will go out of my way to avoid contributing to it. The life lived by the fancy free-range bug-foraging high-welfare heritage chickens sold by my local butcher is… I mean, I don't know all the details, but as far as chicken needs go I think it's pretty ok up until the final butchering scene.
So with that calculus in mind, you can reduce carbon emissions AND reduce suffering AND get to eat a much nicer grade of chicken. (You can do 2 of the 3 by buying fancy high-welfare free-range grass-fed beef, too, and sometimes I do that.)
Does America really have like 99% factory chicken or has free-range made some inroads since I left there 10+ years ago?
Yup - I think there's argument too that carbon sequestration in good quality meadows means that the environmental impact of grass reared cows is potentially much less than for more factory farmed cows. I'd like to see the numbers rerun to consider ethically reared.
For what it's worth, all the red meat we've eaten in the last 12 months was bred by us (lamb), and the pork was bred by our neigbours. We're going to try to breed chickens for meat this summer and if it takes then all our meat will be home grown.
I think American cows are kept in worse conditions than ones elsewhere though. Apparently some of them are kept indoors all year.
When I was still living in Los Angeles, many restaurants served "jidori chicken" that they claimed was good in this way. I'm a vegetarian so I didn't particularly investigate.
Why are we converting kg into tons when tonnes are right there, ready to help us?!
At the object level, the obvious win is to eat sustainable and ethical meat. White Oak Pastures beats Beyond Burgers in terms of sustainability (https://civileats.com/2019/06/19/impossible-foods-and-regenerative-grazers-face-off-in-a-carbon-farming-dust-up/) - beef sinking 3.5kg of carbon per kg of beef produced, vs Beyond, coming in at 2kg of carbon emitted per kg of food produced.
Pasture raised meat is even cheaper than Beyond Burgers. An ethically raised meat animal gets a happy life and a better death than most wild animals. There's just no reason to continue worrying about meat alternatives. We just need to stop doing the horrifyingly awful thing and get back to doing the actually great thing.
This.
For those in the Bay Area who have a chest freezer, I recommend the following sources for extremely high quality, humane, relatively low-carbon-intensity, conveniently packaged meat that is reasonably priced per pound when bought in chest-freezer-filling bulk amounts:
-- Marin Sun Farms for beef and pork (for my household, we ordered a quarter cow and some friends ordered a half hog and we swapped cuts; this is on track to last us 8-10 months)
-- Pasturebird for chicken (the spatchcocked half chickens are super convenient; I ordered a package of 20 halves in January and it's just about time to order another)
We started doing this as a pandemic prepping measure and are likely to continue post-pandemic because we like both the ethics and the taste so much better than grocery store meat.
Oh, and Vital Farms eggs are available from lots of grocery stores and are very good value for the level of quality-- notably, their yolks are the darker orange of European egg yolks and they taste more like European eggs than standard US supermarket ones.
Vital Farms are currently being sued for lying about their animal welfare practices! Rightly or wrongly I don't know.
Also important to note, for those taking their own enjoyment into account: There is a marked difference in quality between factory-farmed meat (especially chicken), and ethically-raised meat. I pay 4x more per unit weight for free-range whole chickens vs grocery store whole chickens, plus I get necks, feet and giblets with the free-range ones (great for making stock).
Source: https://blog.whiteoakpastures.com/hubfs/WOP-LCA-Quantis-2019.pdf Sorry, but I don't understand how this soil carbon capture business with grazing works. Sure, if there is more grass you will capture more carbon, but this effect is not cumulative. Also, when comparing to plant-based foods, the alternative is not over-grazed land (like you get with regular cattle-grazing), but rather reforestation which in turn will capture more carbon than grass fields.
"A factory farmed chicken lives about thirty days, usually in extreme suffering."
Unless I missed it, the above seemed to be as close as you get... but why not touch on the *difference* in conditions than factory-farmed cows vs. chickens are raised in? My understanding - which I think is reflected in Brian Tomasik's table here: https://reducing-suffering.org/how-much-direct-suffering-is-caused-by-various-animal-foods/ - is that chickens suffer much more in captivity than cows.
I'd be interested in a "Carbon offests: much more than you wanted to know" type post that investigates the situation in consumer-level carbon offsetting. I've bought some in the past and couldn't quite shake the feeling that it was, uh, somewhat imaginary.
I would like to write this but last time I looked into it I wasn't able to find great data.
Everyone is aware of the problem where one person who isn't cutting down trees can sell their not-cutting-down-trees-ness to hundreds of carbon offset sites (and then cut down the trees later). Most carbon offset groups claim to have some solution to this, but they don't give a great description of exactly what this is.
There are now direct air capture offsets (where you can pay a machine to take carbon out of the air). These are provably useful, but they're about 100x less efficient than the not-cutting-down-trees kind.
I've considered buying a New Zealand carbon credit for NZD35 or so and then not using it as a reasonable balance between concrete and affordable. I realise this has failure modes too, but I figure it's more robust than an individual forest owner somewhere, people have to collectively lose faith in either the cap and trade scheme or the entire effort of controlling atmospheric carbon for it to fail.
Many cheap "low-hanging-fruit" carbon offsets like "Not-cutting-down-trees" are quite limited. There is a finite amount of trees in the world you can avoid cutting down. Direct air capture on the other hand - while expensive - can be used to suck out an "infinite" amount of Co2. This implies that unless we come up with cheaper ways of removing carbon from the atmosphere, the cost of carbon offsets will greatly increase in the future as we run out of trees to not cut down. This leads me to think that the "true" cost of carbon offsets is probably way higher than $10.
Yes. This is a major concern for me. Even if the easy-to-do offsets are only sold once and really get done, it seems like in any possible world where we beat global warming, those are all things that would have happened anyway, and the *marginal* cost of the *additional* offset that *someone* in the world will ultimately need to do in order to cover whatever-you-were-buying-an-offset-for will end up being much more expensive.
Do the direct air capture options account for the carbon used to run the machinery, the supply chain related to their process, etc?
Via the wikipedia article on Direct Air Capture, I found https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1876610211003900?via%3Dihub which says that if you use fossil fuels to run air capture you can never break-even.
By substitution, any at-scale air capture would better use their energy inputs to displace existing carbon-emitting input to the grid.
(Doing *research* into air-capture is fine, because we may someday have a clean enough grid that we really want to start using excess energy to decarbonize the air.)
Thanks. That's along the lines I would think, that unless our power grid was abundantly non-fossil fuel, trying to use carbon-derived power to remove carbon is pointless. We may want to do some of it just to advance the technology, though. We may find much less energy-dependent means of removing carbon that could be used in the future.
The organization I buy offsets from (https://www.atmosfair.de/en/climate-protection-projects/) doesn't support forest-related projects for that reason (among others). Instead they focus on things like providing fuel efficient wood stoves and supporting green energy production in poor countries.
These projects seem easier to certify/protect against double counting than "not cutting down trees" and also do immediate good in improving living conditions for many people, which I don't think would be the case for direct air capture offsets.
It's more pricy than not cutting down trees though, they currently ask 23€ per ton.
Can someone explain how the offsetting transaction works? Party A gives $ to Party B to offset X. In exchange for $, what does Party B do that offsets suffering or carbon emissions or whatever?
The mechanics seem super hand savvy to me. It looks like the old Catholic indulgence where parishioners paid for their relatives to spend less time in purgatory. Both indulgences and offsets sound unmeasurable and unenforceable.
Carbon offsets usually work by paying for either some sort of carbon absorbing (eg. planting trees) or by paying for replacing carbon-heavy fuels with carbon-light fuels, usually in low income communities. Suffering offsets seem a bit more dubious to me, since I can't really offset one animal's suffering with another animal's joy.
I think the idea there is that the suffering offsets go to organizations that promote meat alternatives or work to improve conditions on farms, thus reducing suffering.
The idea is that if I kill one chicken, and then pay someone else not to kill one chicken, I am neutral with respect to chickens killed. One way of paying someone else not to kill one chicken is eg donating to organizations that advertise eating less meat.
Or if I emit 1 kg of carbon, and then pay someone else not to emit 1 kg of carbon, I am carbon-neutral. The easiest way to do this is to pay people with trees not to cut them down, but this is complicated. The harder but simpler way is to pay people with carbon-removal-machines to remove carbon.
Are you ethically neutral with respect to the people involved, though? That is, *who* is going to take your money to not eat a chicken? If it's someone well-off such as yourself, then maybe it's an even trade, but what if it's a poor person who is desperate enough to replace his nourishing diet of chicken for something more squalid?
One can make a comparison to wealthy people in the Civil War paying poor people to take their places in the draft. In some sense, it's all equal -- one person was called, one person served, and the person called was responsible for supplying the person that served, and did. But it still strikes most of us as ethically dubious, because of the exploitation of the economic distress of others.
I think that's a question well worth pondering in the whole new field of environmental indulgences. *Who* is selling the carbon offsets? If the First World just ends up paying a lot of Third World people to *not* emerge from primitive lifestyles -- to stick with donkeys instead of getting tractors, to live in huts instead of fossil-fuel heated houses, this doesn't really feel like ethical progress.
Buying offsets in the form of someone else NOT taking some action seems like it will obviously lead to people threatening to do something just so that they can be paid for not doing it.
Also, there are double-counting risks if different people feel guilty based on different rules. e.g. Suppose Alice and Bob are each emitting 1kg of carbon, and both want to improve. Alice pays Bob $1 to stop emitting carbon. Alice now feels OK because she has offset her carbon. Bob now feels OK because he's not directly emitting any carbon. Two people now feel good about themselves (no longer feel they need to improve), but only one of them actually stopped emitting.
"Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten."
*Surely* this isn't case? Those chickens will still get sold to other people and then eaten, possibly at reduced price if your refusal to buy them affects demand. The real calculus will have to be how the reduced demand from your refusal to chicken affect prices and supply in the medium to long term.
"possibly at reduced price if your refusal to buy them affects demand"
Well, the demand for chicken (at some price) is the sum of how much chicken people are willing to buy (at that price), so refusing to buy chicken definitionally lowers the demand curve by exactly one chicken. (Unless you're saying something else?)
(The Econ101 language of analysis is that how many chickens get saved will depend on the **price-elasticities** of chicken supply and chicken demand, like you were getting at; presumably refusing to eat 1 chicken saves more than 0 and less than 1 chickens. Googling turns up various estimates of the price-elasticities but I don't know how to evaluate their accuracy.)
Sure, but this is a lot different than saying that this particular chicken might not get eaten. It's even conceivable that your refusal to eat this chicken will not result (slightly) reduced production at all - it might just result in (slightly) reduced price.
Reduced price will make the industry less profitable. In the long run, that'll reduce investment in the industry so it'll get smaller.
This seem likely (not sure if it's certain - could the industry potentially just get by at the same size but lower margin?), but we're a long way away from saving an individual chicken by not eating it at this point.
Like I said, I would expect that it would do *some combination* of slightly reducing production and slightly reducing price, depending on the elasticity of the supply and demand. (If you've sketched supply & demand curves before you can see where I'm coming from here.) It seems intuitively implausible that chicken demand is perfectly price-elastic or that chicken supply is perfectly price-inelastic. I.e., it seems implausible to me that shifting demand down will *only* reduce price. (It also seems implausible to me that it will *only* reduce the quantity.) Light Googling seems to confirm this (though I haven't researched enough to be able to know which of the competing estimates of the price-elasticities to trust).
Personally, I care about my own health more than I care about chicken vs cow suffering. Can we express these numbers as "chickens saved per expected day of decrease in the eater's lifespan"?
See section 4.2 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ . The best studies suggest vegetarians live about 3 years longer (though they are not very confident), so if you eat meat once daily for 80 years, maybe each meat-based meal is taking ~1 hour off your life.
This is further complicated in at least two ways. Removing years from the end of your life may not be that bad, if the last years of your life are less meaningful or enjoyable than earlier years. Assuming that the meat-based diet also leads to reduced health in the years actually lived (you'll have a worse life at 77 instead of that starting at 80, as one possibility), you would still have to weigh the amount of happiness reduction in those years verses the amount of reduced happiness spread out over a lifetime without the more pleasurable meals.
For some people the meat adds no pleasure, so that's easy to discern. For others that would be a miserable life, such that they would rather die much earlier than live without meat. Most of us have some level of happiness reduction without meat, even if it's very hard to measure or generalize.
I will take this opportunity to urge everybody to eat only happy animals whenever possible. Murder is really much more palatable than suffering.
Also happy ones taste better. (For real.)
This point seems underrated.
Strong agree from me.
Chicken and Cows are largely carbon neutral. All of their carbon emissions are part of the normal cycle. This is similar to why burning new-growth wood is carbon neutral.
If there are X chickens in an area before humans/factory farms arrive, and then humans/factory farms increase the number of chickens by 100x, doesn't that mean the chicken-related amount of carbon will also increase by 100x? Once you agree it's increasing carbon by 100x something, what difference does it make if it counts as "natural" or not?
I think you might want to make this more precise. The chickens themselves are necessarily carbon-neutral. All the carbon in the chicken comes from plants, which means it comes from atmospheric CO2, and to that it returns when the chicken is metabolized.
The only way for something to be carbon-positive is if somewhere in the past it involves a withdrawal from a long-lived carbon repository, e.g. sedimentary rock, the deep ocean, fossil fuels. So chicken *farming* is carbon-positive because the farmer burns fossil fuels to heat the barn, drive the tractor around, take the chickens to market, et cetera. In principle you *could* make chicken-farming carbon neutral, if you burned dried grass to heat the barn, and used biodiesel in your tractor (although even they you have the fossil-fuel cost inherent in your physical plant, so let's say you also build everything from local sticks and stones).
All the carbon a plant or animal ever releases was originally outside of it. It takes nuclear fusion to make new carbon, after all!
Just being a smartass :) but that is not actually the case. You can form carbon via fission and radioactive decay also, e.g. boron-12 decays to carbon-12 with a halflife of 20ms, and nitrogen-13 decays to carbon-12 with a halflife of 10min. It would be a very rare fission event that spalled off a C-12 nucleus, but it's certainly possible.
Haha! But of course, that's not happening inside a cow either.
Sure it is! Just in tiny, tiny amounts. Unless you're a nuclear cow:
https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/27/asia/japan-fukushima-nuclear-cows/index.html
I think I may be getting tripped up by the "carbon-equivalent" facet of the problem. There are presumably chemical reactions inside a cow that can produce greenhouse gasses, like methane, where previously there were none. So while a cow's lifetime may be, strictly speaking, carbon-neutral, for the purposes of the atmosphere, it's not carbon-equivalent-neutral because of creating new methane.
The entire system, grass the cow eats + cow's digestion + bacteria in the cow's gut, just create a detour for atmospheric CO2, like so:
1. atmospheric CO2 -> photosynthesis -> cellulose
2. cellulose -> bacteria -> organic acids + H2
3. acids + H2 -> different bacteria -> CH4
4. CH4 -> atmospheric rxn with OH -> CO2
The timescale here is ~10 years, so basically CO2 from the atmosphere takes a 10-year detour through life as CH4, and for those 10 years will worsen the global greenhouse effect (probably), since, C atom for C atom, the CH4 is a more effective greenhouse gas than the CO2 it is temporarily replacing. Would it contribute to any *permanent* shift in climate? Not unless it triggers something otherwise irreversible during the 10-year detour. (Such things conceivably exist, however, so this consideration is not vacuous.)
Interesting. That makes sense. So, even considering that some of the gasses the cow releases might heat the planet more than others, because it's all part of the same cycle, each particular cow's lifetime could only cause a temporary change to the atmosphere, after which it eventually goes back to how it was before the cow was born. Which is a completely different thing from bringing oil up from underground and burning it, which permanently adds new carbon to the atmosphere.
I presume the idea is that one of those is a one-shot increase while the other is an ongoing increase.
If I burn 1kg of coal, one time, that puts some amount of carbon into the air. If I continue burning 1kg of coal per year, it puts more and more carbon into the air every year that I continue doing it.
If I burn a tree, that puts some amount of carbon into the air. If I burn that tree, then grow a new tree to replace it, then burn the replacement, then replace it again, etc. then I am not *continuing* to add carbon to the air. There may have been an increase in carbon from the "first" tree that I burned, but as long as I don't burn the "second" one until I've finished growing the replacement for the first, then there's no long-term buildup.
I think the argument is that the carbon emitted by chickens and cows comes from the plants they eat, and regrowing those plants to feed the next batch of cows/chickens takes that carbon back out of the air (just like regrowing the tree that I burned).
Of course, to some extent, ALL "net-zero" arguments are accounting tricks unless they look at the planet as a whole. What actually happened is that I released carbon by burning a tree, and then captured carbon by growing a tree. One of those was net-positive and one of those was net-negative. Calling some particular things "net netural" is a matter of choosing which events you're going to group together for the analysis.
If only the people behind the JBS cyberattack had read this post in time.
I think that offset prices are still meaningful in the presence of "market failures" as long as the offsets themselves actually work. In other words, as long as it is, in fact, possible to stop Yog Sothoth from consuming a galaxy for $1, I think it's correct to say that eating a chicken (and thus arousing the hunger of Yog) has a $1 moral cost.
If it's actually possible to abate the hunger of Yog with a $1 donation, every $1 purchase made is a missed opportunity to spare a galaxy of intelligent life from unimaginable suffering. Therefore the only reason that Yog should be consuming any galaxies is because every person with dollars has decided not to forgo $1 worth of consumption in order to save a galaxy, _including_ the person eating the chicken. Spending $3 on a coffee in this world is exactly 3X as bad, in terms of destroyed galaxies, as consuming one free chicken.
And likewise, if it's actually possible to abate a ton of carbon with 33 cents, then it's genuinely possible to trade 3 tons of carbon for one galaxy. Every person in this world who gives any amount of money to the Stop Yog fund and the Clean Energy Initiative (or whatever) must be willing to trade one galaxy for 3 tons of carbon. In a real sense, the moral judgment of this society is that a galaxy is as bad as 3 tons of carbon.
But how about market failures? Any traditional sense of market failure should refer to:
1) Externalities
2)
3) Information Asymmetry
The obvious one here is externalities: the costs of Yogging and polluting accrue mostly to people other than the Yogger/polluter. But in both cases, what we're concerned about is pure externality, so it's hard to think about externalities as causing more of a market failure in one context relative to another. Any internal costs and benefits of Carbon/Yog aren't really part of the moral calculus to begin with.
Market power is essentially irrelevant here. It's not particularly relevant if the stop yog fund is charging above-market prices for Yog abatement: I can still get them to Yogproof a galaxy for $1.
And information asymmetry boils down to saying that I might not really know if my donation is stopping Yog. Maybe my donation saves a galaxy, maybe it goes toward a cardboard sign that says "say no to yog" on a galaxy that was never appetizing in the first place. If I can't tell the true Yogsbanes from the grifters, maybe I keep my dollar in my pocket. But in this case, it's just not true that it costs $1 to stop Yog from eating a galaxy, because it's not true that I could give up a dollar to save a galaxy.
This sort of Singeresque utilitarian chain of logic has led me to the conclusion that very few people actually believe in catastrophic anthropogenic climate change; my thought is it’s actually a kind of character signaling, like wearing a mask after being fully vaccinated: “I recognize that doing this benefits no one, but I want to send the signal that we should take stronger collective action on similar problems.”
Yeah, the observed behavior simply does not seem to match the urgency of the message.
One of the best examples of this, I think, is South Florida, which is very liberal. Despite the implications of the predicted anthropogenic climate change, there has been no particular exodus from an area that is slated for devastation, economic disaster, etc. And perhaps we could expect this from some segment of the population, but there should be a measurable and obvious effect on property development or residency, and there isn’t.
Either their implicit confidence in the ability of the government to mitigate costs is very high, or catastrophic climate change seems very unlikely. Or, perhaps, the future discount rate is extremely high and effects of climate change are reasonably far off, I suppose: that could be it, but I would think the evolutionary impulse to provide for one’s heirs by not investing in the equivalent of a plantation on the slope of an active volcano would be stronger than this.
Well, the whole argument tries to reach zero sum morality of different acts. It's not a question of 'should we do x?' but of 'should we do x or y?'.
That said, I agree. There's an unaddressed black swan risk of catastrophic climate change. As in, we assume the model itself makes sense and that we have not vastly underestimated any of the risks.
This is sort of touched on in the Lovecraft section, but IMO it makes the whole thing shakily reasoned. It's like caveating that an argument works only if the world works exactly as the argument describes, which is tautological. If each unit carbon is mispriced on the high end because it doesn't factor in the small benefit of literally saving humanity, then this whole analysis doesn't work.
Right.
I am undecided whether this is another naïve-utilitarianism problem or mankind is essentially utility-irrational. Leaning toward the former: utility is just not properly calculable and so we end up with a lot of absurd results at the margins.
I continue to wear a mask after being vaccinated, and I disagree that it benefits no one. Vaccination is not perfectly effective, and wearing a mask costs me nothing, so it seems like the rational choice. I hope that it also helps normalize continued mask-wearing, for the benefit of those who cannot be vaccinated or for whom vaccination is less effective. And masks help prevent respiratory infections other than COVID.
Seems like this argument proves too much; if wearing masks has no costs and the benefits you say it does, everyone should continue to wear masks forever.
I think you should be allowed your preference, but the reasoning and evidence for it seems poor to me, so I think I’ll continue to say that there is no further benefit: this seems to be true on net.
I mean, I think people should continue to wear underwear forever too, and underwear is undeniably more uncomfortable than masks.
Both masks and underwear will always be relevant for some contexts. The question is just how many contexts. (I don't imagine the person you are replying to wears a mask while alone inside their own home, and I imagine if we look through lots and lots of cases, we'll discover fewer disagreements than you might expect about which situations are ones where wearing a mask is currently helpful, and might continue to be helpful years from now.)
It is certainly the case that in some circumstance, sometime, masks might be merited.
I have considered at length the idea that they are merited after vaccination and frankly I don’t think it’s worth engaging.
Really? I always wear underwear, even when home alone, overwhelmingly because of its practical usefulness, and in most settings nobody would guess if I didn't.
You didn't make an actual argument against "everyone should continue to wear masks forever". If doing so costs them nothing, then I think they should. Many people, of course, will find that it does cost them something.
No, I didn’t. No offense, but I have already considered this and have no faith that novel, interesting aspects will suddenly emerge that make your argument, such as it is, more compelling. As such I had no desire to engage further.
Masks do have costs, though. Presumably masks wear out, and obviously need to be purchased in the first place. If everyone in the world wore one disposable mask per day, we would be looking at ~8 billion masks thrown out daily, at a cost of $4 billion a day. But those are not the worst costs of wearing masks.
Consider these as well:
We have trouble recognizing individuals or learning who new people are if we cannot see their faces.
Facial expressions convey significant meaning, both in terms of communication but also developing relationships.
We have trouble understanding people when they speak, because the mask muffles the sounds and also because we cannot see their lips move to help.
Deaf people and other lip-readers literally cannot participate in conversations.
Masks that are not cleaned, or are worn for long periods of time, develop bacteria, molds, and other harmful pathogens, which are then breathed in repeatedly.
Individuals with asthma and other breathing difficulties may have significant reactions to limited oxygen from wearing a mask - and I have trouble believing that those without asthma have no negative effects from reduced oxygen as well.
Mask-wearing may be lower cost than what you feel you gain from it, but there are huge costs to continued mask wearing.
The comment I replied to claimed that vaccinated people who continue to wear masks must merely be engaged in virtue signaling because wearing them has no benefit. To answer that, I need only show that such people may *believe* they have benefits, which I have done, making the commenter’s assumption superfluous.
Obviously, at some point, continuing to wear masks may have costs for some people, who might then cease wearing them. I already have a bunch of reusable masks, so their purchase cost is no longer relevant. In the course of a day, I may encounter hundreds of people by whom I have no desire to be recognized and with whom I do not wish to communicate. If I did want to communicate with someone and found that my mask hindered it, I suppose I could lower it long enough to finish the conversation, which would not in any way negate the benefit of wearing it during the hundreds of other encounters. I wash my masks regularly and do not wear them for long periods of time. Tests have shown that masks do not limit one’s access to oxygen.
So, yes, *some people* might find that the costs of wearing masks outweigh the benefits. Others, like me, find the benefits outweigh the costs. I think a reasonable person would suppose that the people they saw still wearing masks were in the second category, instead of imputing silly motives to them.
I struggle with these kinds of estimates of carbon cost. A cost of $10/ton where the average American releases 17.5 tons per year implies that all of America's contribution to global warming can be erased for less than half a dollar per person per day. I think if that was true it would have happened already.
Another commenter points out (I think correctly) that this is likely because offsets are currentl rare enough that easy, cheap methods of offsetting are still readily available. To try and offset _all_ our production would rapidly swamp these options and leave only more and more expensive options until eventually it gets cheaper to pay for the massive battery banks or whatever and stop producing.
So it's only so cheap because almost no one is doing it.
Which, to my mind, doesn't mean one shouldn't do it.
It's pretty clear that the costs of climate compensation overall is _vastly_ higher than this number, but it's conceivable that we do so little that there's an amount of low-hanging fruit that can be picked at a very low cost.
Sweden is a rare country that has a decent CO2 tax at $127/ton, but even this is probably too low, and something like $250 would likely be better. Once we have large-scale carbon sequestration, it will be easier to tell for sure.
Even at this point though, it tells you that it's not a massive deal - it's not some truly gargantuan cost to fix the AGW problem, and it can be measured in a few thousands of dollars per capita per year - and much less if you start out by making the cheap, simple efficiency fixes. Sweden has emissions at 5.5 tons per capita, less than a third of the U.S., at little obvious cost. Some of this is luck with hydroelectric, but that's just a part of it.
This lead to the simple CO2 solution - tax CO2 at the cost to either fix the damage or to compensate. Apply import tolls of the same cost on countries that refuse to do this. (Maybe do something similar to methane.)
The EU is starting to lean in this direction, and if the EU and the U.S. would do this is a block, it would solve most of the problem in one stroke.
"AS a block"
Bit off topic but maybe still worth thinking about:
I think the offsets will be larger. The price of, say, 10$/ton of CO2 is low at the moment because there are currently quite a few low hanging fruits for CO2 offsetting. As soon as this will be more popular, prices will go up, not/not only because of capitalism, but also because it will be more and more difficult to find cheap ways for compensating a ton of CO2. Otherwise, I mean, let each citizen pay 17.5 * 10 = 175$ climate tax each year and the problem would be solved.
This is pure speculation, and I would much appreciate a more informed reader's comments on it.
Alternatively, economies of scale and the incentivisation of new technologies might lower the price.
There's also the question of timing. Maybe that $10/ton means "we will *eventually*" remove a ton of CO2 for you, but it might take several years." So that would no longer work if you needed to remove 18 tons per person *per year*.
I am endlessly perplexed (and a little vexed) that otherwise-sensible-seeming people assign moral value to the suffering of animals who cannot possibly reciprocate. What am I missing?
Why is reciprocity the standard for compassion?
Why should compassion be the standard for morality?
Being more specific: compassion is an emotion. It comes from a dumb part of your brain and is subject to a lot of pretty terrible biases; you'll feel more or less compassion for somebody depending on how good-looking they are, what race they are, who they remind you of, how physically near they are to you, how well you know them, and so forth.
In order to treat people (or animals) fairly you need to start by disregarding compassion.
so rephrase the question to ask: why is reciprocity relevant in determining moral standing?
Do you assign moral value to the suffering of babies, who cannot possibly reciprocate?
Empathy.
I feel empathy towards cute animals, I think because they remind me a bit of human babies. I probably wouldn't enjoy *watching* them suffer. But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents, I don't feel bothered in the slightest by their abstract suffering. Nor do I understand how any rationalist could.
At what point does a living thing become a moral agent? Would a mentally disabled human being meet that standard? How about an infant that is known to be mentally disabled?
To me, these questions prove the limits of an ethical system that grants moral importance only to those beings on equal intellectual standing. The important thing, to those rationalists who are bothered by animal suffering, is that animals are obviously capable of experiencing terror, pain, and other basic emotions both positive and negative. It almost seems like you're measuring the worth of other beings purely by how much your empathy is incidentally engaged by them.
> At what point does a living thing become a moral agent? Would a mentally disabled human being meet that standard? How about an infant that is known to be mentally disabled?
I would resolve the issue by saying the following: Strictly speaking, mentally disabled individuals shouldn't count as moral agents, but we should treat them as if they are because it's easier, neater, cleaner, and more aesthetically pleasing for our moral system to accept a few false positives than to try to identify exactly where the dividing line lies between humans who do and do not have moral worth.
"Human rights for humans" is a pretty workable Schelling point, much better than "human rights for anything with IQ > 40".
but from where do you derive the moral standing of humans? if you just summon it from nothing, you can (fairly, i think) be charged with speciecism. it seems arbitrary. the line might be drawn anywhere. you would have no argument against someone saying only people from their country, say, have moral standing, or people of their ethnicity.
What's wrong with specieism? Every *other* species on the planet is totally self-centered -- lions do what is best for lions, ants do what is best for ants. Why should we be different? And if we *are* different -- if we have unique responsibilities, does it also follow we have unique powers and rights, too?
> But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents...
I think you have a mistaken view of how rationality relates to emotional phenomena like empathy. The reason you don't feel bothered by their suffering probably isn't because you reasoned it through and found they aren't legitamate moral agents; I think that kind of stuff is largely pre-rational, at least in the moment of considering it (maybe a person can use reason to shift their views over longer periods of time). So maybe you're just not wired to care about that stuff, meanwhile we are.
> Nor do I understand how any rationalist could [feel bothered by it]
Again I think you have a misunderstanding of the relationship between rationality and emotions. How is your empathy toward human babies any more rational than empathy toward non-human animals, or empathy toward rocks for that matter? If it's a matter of reciprocation, the question just gets pushed back further to the question of why caring about "reciprocation" is rational. If that's a matter of your own suffering, you have to ask why caring about your own suffering is rational, and I think I'd assert there's really no getting underneath that one. You either care about nothing or you care about something without a rationale.
The agent/reciprocity argument is basically how I see it as well. It's why I wouldn't expect aliens to eat us if they showed up, unless we're like insects to them. If it's more useful to trade with you, then that's what they'll do.
Looking at it this way, there are some animals that you might be able to extend some view of morality to, since they seem to understand what it means to cooperate with humans (smart dogs, dolphins?).
If you focus on suffering, is it then ok if we genetically engineer animals to not suffer from factory farming (or even enjoy it)? I somehow suspect that would still be objectionable, so I end up not really believing the suffering line.
"Nor do I understand how any rationalist could."
Wouldn't that depend on their utility function? Most people, including most rationalists, just aren't fully selfish.
> But since I rationally know they're not human babies, nor members of any category (no matter how fuzzily bounded) of potential moral agents, I don't feel bothered in the slightest by their abstract suffering. Nor do I understand how any rationalist could.
Suppose a superintelligent AI or alien race describes to you a category that humans are too dumb to understand, say "uber-morality", and then employ your argument to justify causing human suffering, would they be justified? If so, then I commend your consistency.
If not, then I have to ask 1) where you draw the line of "moral agent" and why animals couldn't qualify, and 2) why they shouldn't be given consideration within a moral system despite not being moral agents.
"Empathy" is a really dangerous answer. What if I _don't_ feel it towards animals in the abstract?
I'm a bit confused by this question. Are you similarly perplexed (and vexed) that otherwise-sensible-seeming people assign economic value to bars of gold who cannot possibly reciprocate? Or am I missing the point?
Moral value =/= economic value.
Right, but I don't understand why reciprocating value is important to either. Morality is very often concerned with people who don't reciprocate, so I'm confused as to why you think it has to involve reciprocation.
I think that moral and economic value both derive from the preferences of beings that have preferences, and neither depends on reciprocity.
I don't personally believe that moral worth has to involve reciprocity. That said, there are obvious differences in kind between economic value and moral value.
One key difference is that morality generally has to do with conduct relating to living things that can feel, experience, grow. Economic value can exist in an automated machine world with no living beings and no subjective preferences.
I believe in inherent moral worth, but not based on reciprocity.
I want to live in a world where a sufficiently more advanced species than myself doesn't neglect all meaning and suffering in my life when making their decisions about whether or not to conquer our planet and take all of its resources. Given that that is the case, I feel morally obligated to also consider the meaning and suffering in the lives of species that I am more advanced than. Even moral considerations aside, our behaviour towards cows and chickens could well be part of a negotiation between us and a much more advanced species.
Or you can source your beef from a farm that feeds the cows kelp to reduce their methane outputs and feel confident that you've made a great decision. https://www.ucdavis.edu/news/feeding-cattle-seaweed-reduces-their-greenhouse-gas-emissions-82-percent#:~:text=A%20bit%20of%20seaweed%20in,the%20University%20of%20California%2C%20Davis.&text=%E2%80%9CThis%20could%20help%20farmers%20sustainably,the%20world%2C%E2%80%9D%20Roque%20added.
I'm familiar with the research, but do you have any evidence that there actual commercial farms doing this in a way that means I can buy kelp-fed beef?
As far as I know, the research hasn't been broadly implemented since it's so new and there are relatively few kelp farms, but it's something to look out for in the future. So, no, you can't buy kelp-fed beef just yet, but I anticipate it'll be coming soon, especially in Australia where the kelp species used in the research so far grows.
I would think health differences should factor in to this decision.
But also, it's hard for me to wrap my head around the mindset that one could take animal suffering or CO2 emissions from meat eating seriously enough to do this math and alter their diet or pay for offsets but not just...stop eating or rarely eat meat.
Why? Paying $400/year seems much easier than becoming a vegetarian (especially if you're rich). It seems totally plausible to me that people might care enough to do an easy thing, but not enough to do a hard thing.
I'm skeptical offsets ultimately offset anything.
I also feel like if I felt actual guilt about the animal I'm eating suffering, my brain does not compute someone saying it doesn't count if I make payments I'm not sure work. The meat is still in front of me!
Maybe I could keep eating the meat by not thinking about it, but not if I already know. And doing this math and then believing my own math enough to fork over money would mean I think I know it's bad. Bad as in something I don't want to do but I'm still doing because...it tastes good?
I can't wrap my head around it, really. I stopped eating meat when I started getting what I think was psychosomatically sick to my stomach any time I ate it because my brain believed it was bad.
If you're rich, you could throw money at deliciously prepped non meat foods. And maybe pay offsets for your friends, family, or pets who don't or can't care (in case offsets work?).
The difficulty is definitely subjective and goes down over time as you get used to it. I think it was harder back in 2010 when I first stopped eating meat but I'm constantly pleased with how much easier it's getting as it becomes trendier.
As long as I'm not strict about occasionally ignoring chicken broth or having seafood a few times a year in social situations with limited menus, it's like ignoring options I just don't even like, a non thought.
If I lived in a group house with meat eaters and didn't make my own food, that would be more difficult I suppose, but would someone in that scenario even be able to pick all chicken or all beef?
JBS, a major beef slaughterhouse operator recently had to cease operations due to a cyber attack (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-31/meat-is-latest-cyber-victim-as-hackers-hit-top-supplier-jbs).
While not yet confirmed to be ransomware, let's assume it is. In the moral calculus outlined in Scott's post surely the cyberattack is a net good since the reduced cow suffering and cow related carbon emissions caused by the attack outweighs the CO2 involved in the bitcoin transaction that will be used to pay the ransom, no?
- Ban Bitcoin for all uses without environmental offsets
- Bitcoin becomes exclusively used for cyber attack ransoms on oil pipelines and beef factories
- decentralized prevention of global warming is achieved?
Depends on how you account for the good and bad produced by all the other cyberattacks that will be inspired by this one (on oil wells and hospitals alike).
Does anyone actually care about any of this with respect to their dietary decisions. For most people these are visceral not mathematical decisions. For example, after having visited (my father’s) chicken hatcheries, production and beef packing plants (for all, read “slaughtering” houses) when I was about 9, I haven’t eaten any bird or mammal. It’s not a function of any rationalist judgment. At some point it was clear that I couldn’t consider eating certain things. For about 20 years I was a vegetarian. Then, I tried to distinguish the source of my eating habits. I realized that I couldn’t abstract from the killing process. But, there was some killing I could tolerate and would do. Namely fishing. Although I didn’t then eat fish, I had fished and gutted fish. That truth led to my starting to include fish in my diet. Not because it was more sustainable (it may not be) but because I would kill it. Therefore, I would eat it. Can I justify it by neuron count? No. Do I care? No.
When I see a hamburger I see a cow — one I would pet. When I see fried chicken I see my neighbor’s chickens whom I know by name and have held. These aren’t calculations. They’re either psychologically instinctual or ontologically driven.
To wit, most people who try to be vegan or vegetarian for environmental (CO2) reasons end up struggling and at some point either failing or internalizing a moral and visceral perspective. Again, rationalism largely fails here. It’s similar to the way that people stop exercising their new year resolution to work out by February. Either they internalize it into some ontological part of themselves, or they struggle and fail.
Given all that, the reality for most people is that mammals feel to us more akin us than do birds. We relate to them. We kiss our dogs, hug our horses, feel the run our hands over the velvety soft nose of cows. Birds seem more foreign, easier to prey upon. Again, not necessarily justifiable (as you demonstrate) but your argument is taking place in the wrong universe. That makes it irrelevant to actual dietary decisions.
"Does anyone actually care about any of this with respect to their dietary decisions." Yes. Personally, I eat red meat or dairy about once a week but never ever chicken or eggs (or fish) for exactly the reasons described in this post.
I try to be vegetarian, but when I cheat I make sure to cheat with beef rather than chicken, and I also offset it. I know several other people who eat beef but not chicken for the same reason.
I went vegetarian directly as a consequence of reading the argument that buying meat sends demand signals to factory farms, and thus my buying meat actually *causes* animal suffering.
Previously, I knew and cared that animals were suffering a lot in factory farms, but I didn't care about my own consumption because I assumed my individual contribution did not have any real effect at the farms. Once I was convinced that my purchasing of meat actually did have a causal chain leading to concretely more animals being raised, I became emotionally motivated to stop.
Tongue only loosely in cheek, this ends up seeming like an excellent argument to donate to charities which provide contraception. Assuming that <$175/year provides funding to prevent at least one new human (which seems like a reasonable guess) you can "offset" your entire life's consumption of not just meat but all carbon-emitting goods and services for the same or less than commercial carbon offsets. Plus improve the quality of life for women in need of health care!
Or better still, mandatory sterilisation! (If we're going to be offsetting immoral acts with moral ones anyway then why not?)
You don't have to make it mandatory. I would guess there are millions of women in Bangladesh or Nigeria who are so desperately poor that they would gladly take $200 -- for them a princely sum that could seed a whole new life -- to be sterilized. The ethics here are pretty troubling, though.
I would be surprised if $175/month could prevent a human. That might be the base cost of contraception, but you can't save a starving person for the cost of food, or a diabetic for the cost of insulin. I don't have a great explanation for why other than that it takes a lot of money and resources to find/reach the right person who needs help, and you need to help a lot of people who would eventually be okay without your help in order to hit the one person who wouldn't.
If you are doing comparisons of the number of suffering chickens vs. number of suffering cows, should you also multiply by their respective lifespans? (i.e. how long they suffer for) Why or why not?
I think you should. I don't care about the killing; I only care about the suffering. I have done that math, and if I recall, the numbers still come out firmly in favor of eating beef over chicken.
Somewhat nitpicky -- but the CO2Equivalent numbers you're using for methane are on a 100-year timescale. When we consider the CO2E of methane on a 20 year time scale, it's 3x as high. (put plainly: methane emissions from cattle burps are responsible for 20% of all warming in the next two decades).
I'd love a source for that "20%" thing. I have found articles claiming that _the entire climate impact of human agriculture_ is on the order of 20-ish %.
The linked guesstimate (https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/10897) in the EA post you cited for the chicken estimate (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9ShnvD6Zprhj77zD8/animal-equality-showed-that-advocating-for-diet-change-works, "But what if it were chicken?") seems to say that it actually costs $0.82 to spare a chicken, not $6; it gives $6.64 for the cost to avert a chicken year. But the EA post itself says that it costs "$5.70 per chicken spared (90% interval: $0.71 to $32) and $50 per chicken year (90% interval: 6.3 to 280)". I'm confused. Maybe either the EA post or the guesstimate were updated without the other also being updated?
Thanks for noticing that; you're right that it's confusing (although blessedly doesn't seem to switch the conclusion here).
chicken are basically vegetables, so if I'm on a day I'll feel guilty I eat them instead of a mammal
Possibly too tangential, but: Did anyone ever figure out why Yudkowsky is so confident that most animals, including chickens and cows, don't have qualia? (Referenced but not spelled out here, as well as some other places: https://rationalconspiracy.com/2015/12/16/a-debate-on-animal-consciousness/.) I'm very curious what his (presumably partial) solution to the hard problem of consciousness is.
Oddly enough, after reading that I suspect he's committing the same "typical mind" fallacy that he cavalierly accuses others of in a few places on that page. Specifically he thinks reflectivity resulting in something like an "inner listener" is necessary to qualia. I suspect typical-minding because I used to have the sense of an inner listener that he describes, and I considered it fundamentally important in defining my self, but it went away after meditation while qualia remained. As a result of that, and separately of light experimentation with drugs, I became much more of the opinion that people's experiences can be really quite different from each other in ways that cannot be communicated effectively to people who haven't had similar experiences.
What about the price of the meat itself? Chicken is significantly cheaper per calory than beef, leaving me with a budget surplus that I could then use to pay for the chicken offset. Or effects on your person health for that matter, my impression is that chicken is healthier than beef, and being healthier would allow me to work more overtime, earning more money once again.
I think the model here is far too simplistic, which is my issue with effective altruism in general - reality is complex and I could easy choose a different set of effects to focus on to argue for the opposite conclusion.
I did this moral math a few years ago (they are somewhere at the old blog, I asked a bunch of questions over a few OTs). But the ethically raised chicken seems cheaper than the beef, meaning I could just "buy the offset" by paying for the ethical chicken.
Does marginal spending on carbon offsets actual cause more carbon to be offset? I worry that we have, say, 1 billion tons of carbon offsetting capacity right now and if more people want to carbon offset, the price just goes up without the capacity increasing. Now increasing the demand for carbon offsets would increase the incentive for people to build out carbon offsets and that's plausible, but does it happen at a 1:1 rate? I'm sure economists have tried to quantify stuff like this and I'm just ignorant of the terminology.
I think this mostly shows how the "offset" concept is flawed. It's not what consequentialism is trying to get at - the offset donation is not causally connected to eating the meat - and it's used as a 'noble lie' to get people to donate at least something to charity despite being reluctant to give an altruistic amount, but like all noble lies it's incompatible with clarity of thought. Trying to staple it together with economics and its (also fictional) perfectly rational actors is a case of making two simplifying assumptions that contradict each other. Ultimately, the answer has to be to do the math on "direct animal suffering" vs. "risk of apocalypse / human suffering from global warming", and only consider money if actually making a charitable donation. The former is probably bigger, and certainly easier to quantify, which feels to me like it should carry more weight somehow.
For my part, I follow a principle of not eating mammals, which I adopted a long time ago because it's a relatively bright line while leaving me able to eat *something* in most restaurants / social settings. For myself I buy fish. In principle beef causes less suffering than chicken, but I've kept to the deontological rule in this case, though perhaps I should change that.
(On neuron counts - it's not obvious to me whether the function should be steeper than linear. Killing a bunch of individual neurons doesn't seem as bad as killing a single animal with all of them connected... but, OTOH, linearity is stable with regards to fusing brains together, so maybe it's necessary to have it as the first approximation.)
I'm confused by the first paragraph. It doesn't seem to be a noble lie if you actually pay the offset (AFAIK it just works fine in that case). If you don't pay the offset, then you're using the market to set prices, which seems like a reasonable thing to do.
Well, 'noble lie' is imprecise, sure. It's a metric to get people to do something good by setting an arbitrary standard, that sets a Schelling point for limited altruism (because perfect altruism is too high a bar). But there's no actual reason that i.e. eating beef requires a carbon offset donation, nor that making the donation requires having eaten beef beforehand, nor anything fundamental that connects the quantities of the two. The moral option is to not eat the beef but still make the offset donation.
As to using money as a scale of measurement, as you said with the Yog-Sothoth example, the whole situation with no-brainer charity donation implies a market failure somewhere.
To me the moral calculus seems even more lopsided than that. I don't really care about the deaths of animal who don't make plans for the future, I care about their suffering and quality of life. On that basis chickens have utterly terrible lives and while cows experience some suffering in their lives, particularly at the end when they get shoved onto feedlots, but it seems that on net they probably have lives worth living? I think I'd rather be reincarnated as a cow than face non-existence.
> "Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten."
Well, it will depend on the price-elasticities of the chicken supply curve and the chicken demand curve, right?
E.g. on the supply side: Perfectly elastic supply means refusing to eat 1 chicken causes 1 fewer chicken to be eaten (and the price will stay the same); perfectly inelastic supply means refusing to eat 1 chicken causes 0 fewer chicken to be eaten (and the price will go down). (And then vice-versa for demand.)
In reality I assume the elasticities are somewhere in between, so on average every chicken that someone refuses to eat saves somewhere from 0 to 1 chickens on average.
Anyone have any empirical data on the elasticities of the chicken supply and demand curves? Or for other animals, for that matter — I guess all else equal, you can do more good the more elastic the supply and the more inelastic the demand for that animal.
what I could tell from the literature, the price of meat is relatively inelastic, though it depends a little on the region & the type of meat. see this post for some cited papers: https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/two-inadequate-arguments-against-moral-vegetarianism/#the-argument-from-price-elasticity
that should read "from what"
> (it's still totally fair to eat chicken and donate $1 to the Stop Yog Sothoth Fund, it's just catastrophic if you abstract away the step where you donate the dollar)
that doesn't really seem like a perfect utilitarian calculation. of course one option is to eat a salad and not donate, and compared to that eating the chicken and donating seems fair. but another equally plausible option is to eat a salad and also to donate, and compared to that the expected utility of eating chicken and donating is terrible (one whole world lost).
> Either carbon offsets, animal suffering offsets, or both could be market failures like this. In fact, if you believe that we're currently not doing enough to fight climate change or animal suffering, I think you almost have to believe there are market failures in offsets.
how about believing that there are no market failures, but that there are low-hanging fruit, and the current offsetting prices are determined by changes on the margin, whereas average offsetting prices – if we tried to reduce animal product consumption completely to zero, say – would be much higher.
This is missing two important points. 1. Chickens have much shorter lives than cows and 2. The typical farmed chicken's life seems more miserable than the typical cow's.
Both of these are clearly relevant.
The dilemma between decreasing CO2 but saving the lives of chickens vs cows is very much like Chappelle's genius bit about comparing Bill Cosby to a superhero that saves lives but rapes. "That's the dilemma for the audience. Because he rapes, but he saves a lot of lives. And he saves way more than he rapes, and he only rapes to save. But he does rape.”
"Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten." Not sure I agree with the argument here - the marginal chicken you decide not to eat is already dead and will now land in the bin. Your individual actions may have no impact but that doesn't absolve you from your moral responsibility.
it's true that you won't save those chickens, but it's not true that your individual action won't have any expected impact. quoting myself:
> The first argument goes as follows. The law of supply & demand says that when supply exceeds demand, prices go down. Take cattle ranchers, for example. They already maximise production in the area they have – they are not going to be producing less cattle if demand drops. Instead they will sell it at a lower price. But if they make any profit at all from their cattle, they will raise as much cattle as they can. Hence people going vegetarian won’t reduce meat consumption, because meat eaters will make up for the lost quantity demanded by buying more meat at cheaper prices.
>
> In economic terms, this argument makes the claim that the price of meat is perfectly elastic, that is, the price will adjust as demand changes. But from what I can tell from the literature, the price of meat is relatively inelastic, though it depends a little on the region & the type of meat.[4][5] That makes sense in the developed world at least (but likely elsewhere, too) as meat, for meat eaters, is something of a necessity; and moreover, if the price of meat fell, most people wouldn’t eat more meat for the simple reason that they already eat about as much meat as they want to.
>
> It’s true that the cattle rancher maximises production in the area they have & that they’re unlikely to start producing less cattle when demand drops. But at some point the price of purchase isn’t going to cover the costs of production anymore, especially taking opportunity costs into account.[6] So the whole ranch will have to fold & the rancher will need to find something else to do with the land, e.g. lease it to some developer.[7] And there will always be some cattle ranchers whose profit margins are very low; these will be the first to go when demand goes down.[8]
=> https://www.erichgrunewald.com/posts/two-inadequate-arguments-against-moral-vegetarianism/
> Your individual actions may have no impact but that doesn't absolve you from your moral responsibility.
I disagree; if your individual action has no impact, you have no moral responsibility.
However, to my knowledge, buying chicken *does* cause more chickens to be raised, and so your individual action has concrete impact.
So this is vaguely related, and hopefully someone here can help me.
I've been trying to find information on the "ideal" diet from a climate perspective. This article is combining climate and ethical considerations (which I think is totally worthwhile), but if, for a moment, one completely ignored the ethical considerations of eating meat and _only_ cared about the climate impacts of one's diet, what would that diet look like?
From general reading/information floating around, I _feel_ like the "climate optimal" diet would a) involve a lot less meat consumption than your average American diet b) would probably involve very _very_ little beef but c) would not be entirely vegan/vegetarian.
However, I can't find any good sources that talk about this, explicitely.
For context, I ask because, given where I live and my living situation, I have the ability to get all or nearly all of my meat in a way that is, to my personal satisfaction, ethical. But, from a climate only perspective, I'm not sure how I should be allocating my diet.
The simplest answer I suppose is "don't worry about it, just buy offsets", which _does_ sort of solve my individual level problem, but I'm sort of interested in the long term societal options for how to feed everyone with the most climate-netural calories possible.
As a final note, I have been saying "climate impacts" this whole time, but that was mostly as shorthand. I am also interested in more general environmental impacts like water use, fertilizer runoff, etc. I know that that makes it more complicated so I'd accept sources that talk _only_ about climate impacts (CO2 equivalents etc.), but anything that _does_ incorporate more general environmental impact information would be great.
If we're going to talk about "ideals", what makes us think that the ideal climate is the one we already have?
History and intuition suggest that a climate a few degrees warmer would be better overall, so perhaps we should be aiming towards that?
Climate impacts are complicated. It's very very hard to know _exactly_ what will happen, and most of them are likely bad (at the rate of change we are talking about). So I don't mean "ideal" in the sense of "best possible environment. I mean it in the sense of "lest likely to change the environment" since that's the option that has the least liklihood of breaking things.
In other words, given our current understanding of ecology, climate science, etc. if we _weren't_ pumping tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, we would not decide to suddenly try it in the hopes of making things better. Given that, we should be trying to stop pumping CO2 into the atmosphere as well.
For what it's worth, I believe the concern from the most well-informed people is not so much about the end point, but about the rate of change. The argument is that, sure, the Earth can easily sustain a few degrees change in global average temp -- or CO2 levels. Much more significant changes have happened before, and life adapted just fine, even to changes that are much bigger in absolute magnitude than the biggest change in T or CO2 envisioned for anthropogenic causes. But only if it were slow enough, on at least a few thousand year time scale, the way even the fastest natural changes have.
On the time scale of a few thousand years, species can move north or south, the mix in any given location can re-arrange, new wind and sea circulation patterns can change patterns of fertility and land use -- but animals and vegetation can easily adapt to this (and presumably so can we).
But if it happens very fast, i.e. in 100 years, then (the argument goes) the natural world can't adapt fast enough. Ecosystem boundaries can't move fast enough. It's more like a meteor strike than like the end of the last Ice Age. Maybe if it took 5,000 years the agricultural prime land in North America jus tshifts to lower Canada, but ecosystems and people can adapt to that, and very little changes overall, but if happens in 50 years everything just dies because the growing zones move too fast and the entire continent becomes desert or grassland.
I'm not saying the argument is necessarily persuasive, but it's considerably more sophisticated than the naive "The Day After Tomorrow" silliness. We think life qua life suffered considerably after previous abrupt shocks, e.g. the putative Chicxulub meteor that may have had something to do with the K-T extinction event.
Presumably you would want to eat food that goes through the fewest steps between growing in a field and your dinner table. One of the prime reasons to remove meat is that it takes a lot more field grown food (or pasture) to feed an animal and then pass those calories on to you.
The complication is that, especially with a global economy, there are a lot more intermediary steps between growing something and you eating it than just for meat. Importing rare foods from other continents, then over the road to your city, with all of the preservation requirements, processing, etc., will result in a lot of carbon and environmental effects. Depending on the supply chain, a bowl of rice could end up being a significantly bigger environmental problem than a nice big steak. That is, if you got the steak locally and the cow it came from was pasture fed on otherwise unusable land, and the rice was processed and shipped from around the world.
I'm not sure how an average consumer could really calculate the environmental impact of their foods, but there would be a few shorthand things to consider.
1. How far did it have to travel to get to you?
2. How processed was it to make it palatable, keep it fresh, etc.?
3. How many steps between initial growth and your ability to consume it (eaten by animal, then by you, verses just eaten by you) and how efficient those steps are in terms of energy/calories.
I'm skeptical of vegans getting their B12 from supplements instead of meats, because that seems wholly unsustainable and ultimately worse for the environment than many meat-related options. If you would have to import your vital nutrients from countries all around the world, verses relatively local chickens, then I think that should be a consideration as well.
Travel matters, but not a lot. Most of the energy inputs for food happen when it's made at its creation point, by a 10:1 margin last I checked. We have a very good transportation system in the modern world.
A year's supply of B12https://nutrientsbest.com/products/vitamin-b12-2000-mcg/ shipped around the world is insignificant.
Now, I have *health doubts* about a pure vegetarian diet.
Yes, but to further complicate things - assume my charity budget is fixed. I donate x% of my income. Right now it goes all to givewell, but I could divert some of that to a carbon or chicken offset program. Now we have to include the opportunity cost of the human suffering by african children not having malaria nets, for example.
quick correction to your math in the second paragraph:
>switching from an all-chicken diet to an all-beef diet saves 60 chicken-equivalents per year.
by your own estimates, it should be (80 chickens - 0.5cows*20chickens/cow) = 70 chickens. Or another way of looking at it is that you would reduce the animal suffering cost by 7/8
that math error propagates down to all the other calculations, so the simplest way to make it all correct is to round up even farther to half a cow = 20 chickens.
BTW the EDF directly estimates the social cost of CO2 as $50 per ton, which is only 5x the offset cost, so the Yog thought experiment is not necessary. If the social cost were that disproportionate to the offset cost, it would be a lot easier to coordinate emission reductions among countries. If the social cost were e.g. 50x the offset cost, then a completely selfish country with over 1/50 of the world's GDP would still want to unilaterally decrease emissions regardless of what other countries do.
How do the relative health benefits of consuming chicken over beef play into this calculation?
If we're trying to account for global warming/climate change, shouldn't you also be thinking about (1) the cost of feeding cows versus chickens (I'm not an expert but I think it's way more carbon intensive to feed cows, especially if you need to fertilize any pastures, and that's one of the biggest environmental reasons to avoid eating beef), and (2) a lot of modern farming involves transporting cattle between different locations depending on where they are in their lifecyles and there is a lot of CO2 emissions in moving them?
Start by not eating factory farmed chicken or anything else factory farmed or out of a feedlot for that matter.
We should also take account that there are easier way to reduce net CO2 (and methane): a revenue neutral tax on net emissions.
Now I'm curious about lamb and pork.
Pork is ghastly compared to beef. Sheep are dumb as bricks, though, but have an elevated methane footprint.
What about pork? It feels like it should be the best of both worlds.
How so? Pigs are smaller and smarter than cows.
They don't emit methane and probably suffer less than chickens (correct me if I'm wrong). I personally weight the climate impact a lot higher than the animal suffering impact, so anything's better than a cow and pigs are better than chickens.
Well, I roasted a chicken yesterday and I'm thinking of boiling some beef tomorrow. I can't work out if I'm part of History's Greatest Monsters or Doing My Bit To Fight Carbon Emissions 😀
Boiling your beef is a crime against nature. Smoked, grilled, pan fried, braised, anything else is more humane to the people you are feeding.
Depends what kind of beef. If it's, for example, tongue or corned beef, boiling might be the best option.
This is not a steak or a roasting joint, this is "boiling beef". What, you've never cooked anything with stewing beef? 😀🐄🥩 This is a very fancy recipe (I wouldn't use sugar or cloves, bay leaves depending on whether or not I have them, I would use onions, parsnips, maybe some turnips, whatever I have to hand, and stock with dried herbs and a dash of Worcester sauce plus seasoning) https://thescottishbutcher.com/recipes/boiled-beef-and-carrots/
Accompanying song from 1910: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mIMIUqAa3w
"Boiled beef and carrots
Boiled beef and carrots
That's the stuff for your 'darby-kell'
Makes you fat and it keeps you well
Don't live like vegetarians
On food they give to parrots
Blow out your kite from morn till night
On boiled beef and carrots"
("Darby Kell" - short for "Darby Kelly", Cockney rhyming slang, "belly")
Ah I see, it's a language issue. In the US that's called braising not boiling. To us, boiling involves much more water that is disposed of like how pasta is cooked.
Oh indeed, you wouldn't "boil" it, it's "simmer slowly". Other means would be stew (if using diced beef) or casserole it or pot-roast in oven. I prefer to do it on the cooker top as I was taught in my family 😀 You add cold water/stock, bring to the boil, then turn it down and simmer (depending on size of joint) for 1 1/2-2 hours (or more if needed). Doing it in the oven takes a little longer.
There's one called "housekeeper's cut" which is good for this, it has connective tissue running through it which would turn out gristly if you plain roasted it, but slow cooking it in liquid means it comes out melting and tender. https://supervalu.ie/real-food/cooking/recipe/slow-cooked-beef-with-mustard-mash-and-asparagus?ref=meal_planner
(a) This has made me hungry, I am *definitely* cooking that meat joint tomorrow and (b) I rather feel that exchanging recipes about "how to cook beef" is maybe not the right thing on a post about "cut down meat eating as much as possible, to none if you can" 😁
Surely, one must be fully informed to consent to giving up meat...
Does the economic calculus depend on which bit of the animal you're eating?
Is a joint of lamb more or less elastic than haggis (in terms of the total number of animals slaughtered), for instance?
This post could not be a better illustration on why I don't perform moral calculations over my food.
I assume you at least perform enough moral calculations over food to avoid cannibalism? Or maybe you're just lucky the supermarket doesn't carry long pig.
I reckon you could probably do pretty okay in life by outsourcing all your ethical decisions to the rest of society via the proxy of the law. If it's legal, do it. If it's not, then don't.
The law gives you a lower bound, but it's a pretty low bound. For the cliched example, there was slavery. If you knew slavery was wrong, you could do far better than the law, so why not? That magnitude of win would be well worth the moral calculus.
Yes, that would be. It's a lot clearer and less fussy than trying to calculate the differential between beef and chicken. Even "vegan or carnivore?" is a lot more clearcut and easier to figure out where you stand than this is.
What's the problem with doing moral calculations anyway? Is it the effort of the calculations themselves, or the risk of sacrificing more than you should by getting the calculations wrong?
The problem isn't necessarily with moral calculations, it's with moral calculations -over food-. The problems are the tremendous amount of effort and research required and the fuzzy and ambiguous results obtained, especially in combination. As this post amply demonstrates.
The general problem with doing moral calculations is that it tends to increase the risk of moral complacency. "I've *done* the calculations, I don't need to worry about the morality any more." It tends to lead to a discount of the possiblity that the assumptions underlying your calculating are wrong, in part via cognitive dissonance. Plus when you put numbers on things a lot of people seem to intuitively (but wrongly) assume the conclusions are a priori more certain.
Or in other words, sometimes there is a lot of value in saying "I don't know" when you don't actually know. Keeping the fact that you don't know front and center tends to make you more aware of subtle new information that might affect your viewpoint.
I'm not saying any *particular* moral calculation is wrong, or not worth doing (including this one). I'm only pointing out that moral calculation isn't risk-free, can have future moral costs of its own vice human nature.
the equivalent in vegetarianism to realising slavery is wrong and not engaging with or supporting it would be to realising factory farming is wrong and not engaging with or supporting it. if you do that, then there is no need to do any "fussy" calculations. and of course you could do these same kinds of calculations when engaging with slavery, too ("i am calculating that i should get native slaves instead of slaves imported from overseas due to the added suffering of displacement and transportation").
Agreed. In this case you do get to avoid these calculations by just going all the way and obstaining from meat entirely. You could come at that through some kind of moral calculation still (there's some economics involved in understanding that your purchases actually have consequences at farms) but it's a lot simpler.
Now I wonder if I can think of an actual example where tricky calculations really are the dividing line between committing an atrocity or not?
Slavery was about humans. The equivalent argument here would be that domestication of animals is enslavement. Even keeping pets is enslavement. That's a quite different question.
I wasn't trying to focus on slavery itself, just moral atrocities in general.
I don't have to perform those moral calculations. The law and society do it for me.
So would you kill and eat someone in international waters?
Is there any reason you ask such pointless questions?
Would it be okay if we ate the flesh of a being that was adjudged never to have had human personhood and hte rights attached thereto (an aborted foetus, I've had the arguments over "this is only a *potential* person, it's not a human being yet" ad nauseam) or have lost personhood (persons in vegetative states where it's okay to pull the life support plug, people who have advanced dementia etc. where they expressed wish while still compos mentis, or their families on their behalf, or the hospital, judge or whomever wishes on their behalf, to carry out euthanasia)?
Because as I've said, I've seen all the debates about how humans aren't special, there is no such thing as a soul, where the mind is gone or never developed there is no longer such a thing as the human person there, just a lump of flesh, etc. So that should be uncontroversial to say we can consume this flesh, if properly treated, right?
People who are all "abortion is okay because it's only a foetus" and "euthanasia is okay because it's only a vegetable" do not get to dictate to me that "oh no, the poor cows who can have best friends! the poor cluck-clucks!" about what I'm cooking for dinnner.
I think you missed the intention of my comment, which was in response to "I don't have to perform those moral calculations. The law and society do it for me." My point is not that cannibalism is self-evidently wrong, my point (echoing Scott further up) is that cannibalism is an issue where almost everyone would make a personal moral calculation of *some* kind when forced to do so, even if they claim to be happy for "law and society" to make their rules their behalf.
I agree up to a point. If someone wishes to be an ethical cannibal, they will find it very difficult to impossible, as the law and society does not permit cannibalism (weird German cases aside https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/20/remains-in-german-case-show-signs-of-cannibalism). In this instance, law and society has made the rules on our behalf.
Should law and society, in future, make eating the meat of non-human animals illegal, then that will indeed cause people to make personal moral calculations. I can see court cases over people continuing to hunt, or to raise food animals, or butcher them, or eat that meat. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
At the moment, eating people is wrong, eating cows and chickens is permitted.
You're not positing a situation of "forced to do so," like the Donner Party. You're just ignoring the "and society" part of my statement. The point is, in ordinary circumstances it doesn't come up. Extraordinary circumstances are a different question, and not the one you raised.
Where do you live that the law won't care about murder and cannibalism in international waters once you get home?
CHAZ.
As far as moral concern goes, I think it's right to act your rational conviction, but I can't honestly surmount my own doubt that it makes sense to care about animal wellbeing. Animals are just a significant degree less interesting than humans. If I really am to say that chickens have moral worth, I don't see any easy spot to get off that train between chickens and insects. It annoys me when animal rights activists act like it's SO OBVIOUS to care about chickens but don't have an extremely OBVIOUS reason to ignore the potential moral worth of mosquitos or flies. The human race has deployed a gene-drive edited mosquito population in Florida to eradicate a particular kind of mosquito, we're literally doing very-intentionally-engineered genocide on some mosquitoes and while there are detractors of this scheme their criticism seems mostly centered on gene-drives being potentially dangerous and hard-to-control technology with unpredictable outcomes. As far as I've followed the issue, I haven't heard the perspective that we ought not genocide this population of mosquitoes because they have moral worth.
I can, however, contrive a reciprocity test. Which is that cattle are very kind creatures. Chickens are not. Pigs are not. Insects are not. You would not leave a young child in alone in a barn with chickens or pigs as you would be concerned that they would get eaten. You would not have the same concern with cows, apart from getting accidentally kicked or stepped on. I think this makes sense and is not-hypocritical. It's roughly the same logic we apply to humans under liberalism: as long as that human would not harm me, I have no right to harm it. But if we have evidence to believe that a given human WOULD likely bring harm to others, we lock them up.
I think a similar heuristic extends to animals reasonably well, and it leads me to eat chickens and not cows.
I agree mosquitos and flies probably have moral worth. It's probably very little moral worth, but enough that you shouldn't make billions of them suffer or something.
I don't mind animal death as much as animal suffering - my guess is that death is only bad insofar as you have a preference not to die, which animals aren't smart enough to do, but suffering is bad ipso facto. I am mildly concerned (though it's not the top thing on my mind) about insect suffering, and I know some charities working to replace painful pesticides with non painful ones, or stop the factory farming of insects. I support both those efforts.
Are cattle actually that kind? Don't they kick you if you get too close to them? Also, Huns aren't very kind, but I still wouldn't torture/kill/eat a Hun.
"Kind" is certainly not the perfect adjective for what I'm talking about. I mostly think that some form of reciprocity should be central to the heuristic. Cows have no history, that I'm aware of, of killing, enslaving, or displacing humans. Chickens don't either....but they would! This probably deserves some empirical evidence I am not qualified to give, but I get the sense that if chickens were large enough, they'd peck you down without a second thought. Cows are plenty large to bully us somewhat more than they do, and they don't. It is a well known rural fact that even slightly hungry pigs will eat even a human being alive, but cows will not even eat a dead person.
it seems unfair to the other animals to treat them differently based on how they act, for the simple reason that they are not aware of the reasons for their actions, and thus cannot choose to act differently -- they act instinctively. we also usually don't hold other people accountable when we feel they had no choice but to act a certain way, which is one reason why we treat mentally ill criminals differently, or why we don't judge wrongdoing children as harshly as we do adults.
Something about the offset pricing seems wrong. If it's true that the average American produces 17.5 tons of CO2 per and equivalent per year, and that a ton of carbon can be effectively offset for $10 per ton, then an average American could offset his entire carbon output for $175 per year? And the entire country's annual CO2 output could be offset for $58 billion per year?
That's objectively a lot of money... but also not that much. Before we consider economies of scale, it's about five times as big as the Pentagon's fuel bill. That's less than twice the Department of Energy's budget. But all this is orders of magnitude cheaper than the "Green New Deal."
If we set annual costs aside and look at renewable energy projects, this also doesn't seem to make sense. The Topaz Solar Farm costs $2.5 B to build and provides power to 160,000 homes. That's orders of magnitude more expensive. To be very conservative, assume a 5% rate of return to private capital, no operating costs, and that a third of an American's carbon emissions are due to home electricity.... you're still looking at a capital cost of $125 M per year to offset the emissions of 60,000 American households, or $1,000 per person offset in capital cost alone.
If the costs involved in offsetting carbon emissions were really so low, this wouldn't be a major geopolitical issue. You wouldn't need the US and China to agree to any climate treaty, or agree to do anything at all, the EU with its strong Green Parties could simply fix global warming by spending 1% of its GDP.
I notice that I am confused.
But that can't be right. Collective action problems can only exist when the costs of fixing the problem are higher than the harm to any individual actor.
If the costs really are this low, and Europe faces any noticeable harm from climate change, it would be economically rational for them to just fix the problem unilaterally. Forget the PR benefits, the fact that it would be overwhelmingly popular among European voters, the fact that they could force the world to chip in with relatively minor tariffs. The EU could simply solve the problem globally and save money at the same time.
....so why haven't they? They're strongly incentivized to, their voters are for it, they're spending roughly this much on foreign aid already. They could use their aid budget to save the planet and profit at the same time. For as much fun as we poke at the EU, if it was that simple, they would have done it. If only to spite Trump.
The costs for an individual may be $175 a year, but the problem doesn't necessarily scale cleanly. It seems evident that once the low-hanging-fruit ways of reducing carbon are picked, it starts to become more and more expensive to reduce carbon.
It's like buying stocks; just because you can buy the first stock for $X doesn't mean you can buy the millionth stock for $X.
But that's an argument against offsetting being useful at all. Or at least an argument against the prices being useful for making ethical or policy decisions.
If there's only a small number of $10/ton offsets available relative to global emissions, and future offsets sufficient to solve climate change will cost, on average, $100/ton, then the true cost of emitting carbon today is $100/ton. The price that matters is the average price necessary to solve the problem, not today's marginal cost that won't solve the problem.
I was going to say - Europe can't fix it unilaterally because we don't have industrial machines to suck carbon out of the air. But I think you mean paying the offset costs around the world? I think offset costs are still useful when they're marginal, but yes, for policy purposes you need to think about the total cost of solving climate change for your carbon price, which is probably a bare minimum of $50 a ton. So Europe *could* try to unliterally fix climate change, but a) it would cost bare minimum 10% of their GDP and c) it would cost more every year unless all the other countries actually stopped building carbon emitting infrastructure.
Yes, exactly. If the offsets available now are cheap but very limited in quantity, and the cost of offsets required to fix climate change are dramatically more expensive, then you shouldn't use today's prices for the cheap quantity-limited offsets to make moral calculations. You should use the order-of-magnitude-or-more prices of what it would actually cost to solve the problem.
Say you buy a coffee every day for $2 from your local diner, and have a "every tenth cup costs 1cent" card. If you have a fully-punched card in your pocket, yes this next cup will cost you one cent, much as there's no marginal impact whether you eat a particular piece of meat that's already been slaughtered and prepared. But when you consider the cost of going to the diner each day, when you're seeing if your habit is affordable or ethical or doing any type of analysis of this type, the marginal cost of each cup of coffee is $1.80, not 1 cent.
This logic always seems weird to me because if I choose not to order chicken at a restaurant or buy chicken at a grocery store, I'm not actually keeping a chicken from being eaten, I'm exerting extremely subtle market forces that have some small chance of leading fewer chickens to be raised for food in the future. This goes much more so for cows. I'm not sure how sensitive these markets are to differences in demand.
I think you can probably abstract this away - it's like voting, boycotting a company, not wasting water, donating to charity, etc. One person doing these things barely helps at all, but millions of people doing them helps a lot, and you can't have millions of people doing them without individuals doing them.
Something like 5% of Americans are vegetarian, and I do think this probably decreases the amount of meat produced by something like 5%.
That's fair, I was mostly responding to the line, "most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems. Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten." It seems like the abstracting is being applied in one case but not the other, though maybe this is unfair. It's certainly a minor point.
I do separately wonder how much slack there is in the meat market, though, since I assume a fair percentage of it is currently thrown away?
Page 5 of this report https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf asserts that "a fair percentage" is 22%. (50% for seafood, 52% for fruit and vegetables.) I don't know what that tells you about slack in the market, but this is at least a number to have where there previously were none.
How do you feel about keeping dogs and cats as pets? I have a large dog who eats several pounds of chicken and beef per day. The net meat consumption of my household is out of control, totally because of my dog.
I feel pretty hopeless about changing my own behavior, given that anything I do will hardly make a dent in my household meat consumption.
Does anyone know what fraction of meat consumption in the US comes from household pets?
Hopefully not much.
there is plenty of vegan dog foods out there; you can use those to reduce your dog's meat intake if you want.
25-30% according to multiple sources.
It's conceivable that _some_ part of this is meat that wouldn't have been used for human consumption otherwise, but it can surely not be all of it.
The cows replaced the buffalo, who numbered around 50-60 million. There are currently around 94 millions cows in the U.S. .So, you could probably subtract the methane that would have been produced by the buffalo we exterminated from what is currently being produced by the cows to judge the actual impact of beef and dairy operations on climate change.
I found this interesting, looked it up, and came across this page - https://mrdrscienceteacher.wordpress.com/2019/09/21/bison-vs-cow-greenhouse-gas-emissions/ - any thoughts on it?
I think the actual cow vs. bison comparison isn't exactly the point. If we didn't eat cows, we probably wouldn't have millions of bison roaming around. Also, it's not really important to have exactly the same amount of carbon coming from each source - if we had neither cows nor bison, that would reduce some carbon and help compensate for us emitting a lot more from cars and coal and stuff.
I didn't know that -- thanks for the link! I wonder why bison produce less methane than cows? (I assume that dairy cows produce more methane than beef cows due to diet.) I also thought that this fact was quite interesting: "There are over 9 billion livestock (cattle, pigs, chickens turkeys, etc.)" in the U.S. That's a lot of critters in the CAFO chain....
I find referring to "adjusting for market failure" in this context to be rather odd. "Adjusting for market failure", to me, implies that the market price is a valid first-order approximation, and we're taking into account higher order effects. But climate change isn't priced into meat, and even less so is animal welfare. Calling it a "market failure" when you have a moral agenda that the market is ignoring is really stretching the term. Suppose you believed that using contraception is a moral evil, and you value each act of birth controlled sex at -$100. Clearly, that amount of money isn't priced into birth control pills. Is that a "market failure"? Or is that just the market ignoring your moral preferences?
I didn't mean a failure in the price of meat, I meant a failure in the price of offsets. It's still a weird term to use, but I think it makes sense at least analogically.
Low carbon investor here. My assumed social cost of carbon is more like $100 than $10 (off topic, but when I look at the studies that come up with a low cost, their scope is always way too narrow). However, I still prefer beef to chicken, for the animal welfare reasons you set out. Even better, there is an incredible interest among younger cattle raisers in sustainable and regenerative farming practices, and restoring lost carbon to the soil. There are business models emerging whereby you can make good money by adopting such practices. So I expect beef to start moving pretty dramatically towards zero carbon, or even carbon negative, within this decade.
A humanely raised free range chicken is still pretty good sometimes.
I don't understand the underlying assumption that you're responding to, stated but not really proven, that the price of a good (or the cost of an action) has anything to do with its moral value. There's a lot of work being done by this one sentence: "on the grounds that the market has priced its moral cost at lower than chicken's moral cost". What does this actually mean? The market hasn't priced a moral cost at all, and I'm not sure why that would be a default presumption.
In the carbon offset case, the price of an offset is driven by
1. The cost of producing it, eg setting up a biogas digester or hiring guards to make sure a rainforest doesn't get cut down.
2. What people/companies are willing to pay.
3. An incredible thicket of UN and national policy.
As I think another commenter has pointed out, there's a completely separate concept of the social cost of carbon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_cost_of_carbon#Estimates) for which a good estimate might be $100/ton. Unfortunately because this is an externality, and much of it is borne by future generations, there's no mechanism by which it gets incorporated into the demand for offsets and therefore their price, unless many people are actually altruistic and knowledgeable.
For animal welfare, it's even simpler: this isn't the "market price" of anything, it's just the cost of an intervention.
You go on to conclude, I think, that we shouldn't use these prices to determine the ethics of our actions when we don't offset because of "weird market failure" but again I'm not sure where the presumption comes from that a functioning market would set prices equal to the moral costs.
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A second point, and this may be nitpicking, but I'm not sure what you mean by "Nobody agrees on exactly how much it costs to offset a ton of carbon". There are many sellers of offsets and they all charge different prices! There are some legitimate ways to do it for $4/ton, and other legitimate ways to do it for $15/ton.
You do have to be a bit careful with those prices because the products are pretty different. On the one hand, some of them are perceived to be extremely low-quality (meet the certification but are unlikely to be doing much of anything). Some of them have "co-benefits": replacing coal plants improves air quality, protecting rainforest helps biodiversity. And also some of them are actually prices on the secondary market, where people are forecasting the "how much demand will there be fore these credits before they expire".
In any case I would agree that $10/ton is a fair placeholder value for the category.
I have the feeling this math only makes sense if you eat a wide variety of cuts of beef and chicken. If you only eat beef fillet, for example, you're responsible for killing a cow every single meal, granted that you are sharing that moral burden with everyone that eats the other cuts (and it will be a lot of people, sure).
The same can be said about eating chicken hearts, which are delicious, but I stopped eating them because just one small skewer with those are like 5-10 dead chickens worth for what can be considered a light snack.
That seems only true if those chickens wouldn't have otherwise died, though. My understanding is that the demand for hearts is vastly less than that of the demand for drumsticks or wings, which makes non-eaten chicken hearts mostly gone to waste.
If you stop eating the most heavily-demanded parts of chickens (breasts, wings, drumsticks) and eat more of other parts, that seems like it should result in fewer dead chickens overall, because you're not increasing the demand for more dead chickens.
I don't think either of these explanations is quite right. Because breasts, wings, drumsticks, thighs, hearts, and whatnot are available in fixed ratio, prices will adjust so the demand of all the bits is equal, and the most popular bits of chicken will end up being the most expensive, such that the demand for breasts ends up no higher than the demand for thighs. When you eat a particular part of a chicken (or cow), you make that part marginally more expensive, and every other part marginally cheaper, such that the market remains in equilibrium, and in practice you only increase the number of chickens/cows produced by a fraction determined by the ratio of the market value of the part you ate to the market value of the entire animal.
The only exception is if some part of the animal is so undesirable that it is being thrown out rather than sold at the margin. In that case, that part should be available for simply the cost of making it available for sale rather than disposing of it, and eating it should not result in any extra animals being slaughtered. I don't know if hearts are in that category. Either way, they are likely cheap enough that you don't need to feel any more guilty about eating five chicken hearts than you would about eating 1 chicken breast.
Yes, I think you nailed it.
I took to eating chicken livers, based on recipes I got from the old blog, but they may have been giving me gout so I stopped.
And my reasoning was similar: if I am eating animals, eating the less-valued parts of the animal was moral. (And it was an incredibly cheap source of protein, right up there with the rare times a gallon of milk is on clearance for less than a buck.)
Things like offal (such as chicken hearts) are by-products, the chickens will be killed anyway and if you give up buying the hearts, that doesn't mean those chickens will now survive. If the chickens were being specially raised (as for Strasbourg goose specially fattened to produce pate de foie gras) it would be a different case, but as it is, the hearts/tripe/kidneys/liver/crubeens are the lesser cuts of the animal and it's no worse to buy those than the carcass or joints.
The crucial assumption here is that carbon-offsetting actually works in practice. Not surprisingly, a quick search reveals corporations claiming it does, and environmentalist websites claiming it doesn't. This study commissioned by the EU (https://ec.europa.eu/clima/index_en), sides with the environmentalists:
https://ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/ets/docs/clean_dev_mechanism_en.pdf
TLDR is that they found that 75% of supposed "offsetting" activities were "unlikely to have resulted in additional emissions reductions" in the sense that they were not "additional" and would have gone ahead anyway, and only 2% had "high" likelihood creating additional emissions reduction.
Dishing out money to charity instead of reducing your carbon footprint seems a lot like buying indulgences from the church -- if someone says you can do bad stuff as long as you pay them afterwards, you should probably be skeptical.
If anyone has a lit review or any additional meta analyses like this, please do share them.
Here's a good summary of this argument: https://friendsoftheearth.uk/climate/does-carbon-offsetting-work
What bothers me is that the only scale of measurement is dollars--as if my throwing green paper at something actually solves anything. I know that we can do things with green paper, I just don't know that it can be used to solve moral and/or ethical problems.
Yeah, but chickens are our historical enemies, descended from dinosaurs, and they're nasty filthy vicious profoundly stupid creatures, so I'm totally OK with their suffering in the service of my appetite.
Of course, in the event it happens that I eat a vegan diet, for my own health. But I would be totally OK with eating chickens if I weren't. Nasty little creatures.
I think this thought experiment is missing the largest point. Cows have best friends, you can tell the difference between a 'happy' cow and a 'sad' cow. Cows can show affection. To my knowledge, chicken's show none of this. So you could say 1 cow consciousness is worth 1,000 chicken consciousness. Or even more than that if you'd like. For instance, almost no one puts moral weight on killing a fly. There seems to be a cutoff point in which something isn't conscious. Where are chicken's and cows on that spectrum? It's certainly not as easy as comparing the number of neurons.
One other calculation to include is amount of suffering, which seems so much higher for a chicken than a cow.
Both the issues of climate impact and animal welfare vary significantly depending how the animals are raised.
Free range farm animals arguably suffer much less than most wild animals. Plentiful food for life then a quick painless death. One could potentially argue that it's a moral obligation to eat these animals to ensure more are brought into existence.
Cows raised on fresh pasture that are 100% grass-fed (or close to it) also have a much lower impact on climate change than feedlot cattle. They can also be raised on land that isn't suitable for crops, negating the argument that it's inefficient use of agricultural land.
The catch of course is that it's probably not possible to produce current levels of beef and chicken under these humane and sustainable conditions.
You're doing more harm than good here. There are plenty of cold hard facts we can use in order to make these decisions. By injecting sophistry like "consciousness scales with the number of neurons,"you're simply muddying the waters and casting doubt on whatever conclusions we draw.
Edit: "scales linearly" is the key thing I forgot to add. Obviously there is some relation but the idea it is linear is preposterous, and the idea that it has anything to do with a survey on people's intuitive judgements is even stupider.
If you disagree about the assumption about the neurons-consciousness-morality connection, you can just substitute in whatever moral value ratio you personally prefer. The article assumes that, roughly, saving 1 cow is equivalent to saving 20 chickens. If you believe 1 cow is actually worth 3 chickens, or worth 100 chickens, you can just alter the math to reach your own conclusions.
You can use "cold hard facts" for most of these calculations, but when it comes down to ethics, you have to rely on fuzzy and subjective beliefs about the value of those lives.
The market price of carbon reduction is so broken that if you buy a certificate to save 1 ton of CO2, a good approximation is that you safe 0 tons. I would argue strongly against basing any arguments on market prices for CO2 emissions.
How do you safe CO2 in this system? You ask the owner of a forest if he promises to not cut down the forest in the next 20 years. A "yes" is not legally binding, you hope that he feels morally obliged to stick to it. The carbon reduction price is the lowest amount of money that someone is willing to pay for a "Yes". If you have even one traitor then this price is ridiculously low. And note that buyers (think of an airline compensating their CO2) may have an incentive to encourage traitors.
I think this is exactly what happens. I don't even think there are mechanisms for preventing the owner to sell the same piece of forest over and over again, generating CO2 "reductions" out of the same forest many times. And then still change his mind a year later and cut down the forest. This are mechanisms against this in some countries, but as long as it works in some other countries, it will determine the market price.
Dedicated people try to have certificates of better practices. Those try to find out whether the owner is actually serious about it. So they ask "Are you REALLY SERIOUS about not cutting down the forest?", and if he still answers Yes, then he gets the money. Despite sounding cynical, I think this helps a bit.
There are also people (on the level of governments) trying to fix the system. Perhaps we will have a working system in 5 or 10 years. But currently, it is so completely broken that any money you pay now will likely have 0 returns. (There are reasons to use it nonetheless. You can speculate that using the system now makes companies get used to it, and that they can't easily withdraw when/if the system actually starts working.)
"The carbon reduction price is the lowest amount of money that someone is willing to pay for a "Yes"."
Correction: "receive" instead of "pay"
Is it true that farm animals are still given antibiotics as a matter of course to help them grow big? Can you put a dollar value on contributing to antibiotic resistance?
yes, though the main reason is probably to avoid disease, not to aid growth:
> Some antibiotics are given to cattle and pigs to marginally speed up their growth. The biological mechanisms through which antibiotics promote growth aren’t well understood, but the use of antibiotics to promote growth does seem to work. More importantly, raising animals in densely packed conditions requires a steady dose of antibiotics to prevent infections that would otherwise run rampant. [...] For more than a decade the European Union has banned antibiotics for growth promotion in farm animals, and tried to impose standards that increase animal welfare and reduce the need to use antibiotics. The US has begun to follow suit, driven by consumer demand for antibiotic-free meat, and FDA threats of regulation. But most developing countries are moving in the opposite direction, with explosive growth of antibiotic use in both people and animals in China, India, Pakistan, Egypt, and many sub-Saharan African countries (Van Boeckel et al. 2015).
=> https://library.oapen.org/bitstream/handle/20.500.12657/42913/2020_Book_EthicsAndDrugResistanceCollect.pdf?sequence=1#page=306
I think people are emotionally detached from farm animals vs pets and I think it would be useful to include common pets in these questionares as a sort of a control.
for example neurally and in terms of capacity for suffering and moral cost I'd expect pig or a cow to be as valuable as a dog, yet I suspect that most people that had no contact with farm animals disagree, as shown by the western outrage towards dog consumption elsewhere in the world.
What about donating to completely unrelated charities? E.g. you switch to eating beef only but instead of giving that $22 to carbon offsets, you give it to some charity, which you think does even more good. That way, you should come out net positive in the moral calculus.
I try to do a version of this (though I also try to eat less meat in general) and one of the main challenges in practice is knowing whether those $22 really are additional. If you were already giving to charity prior to making this commitment, then whatever sum you donate annually is sort of arbitrary. Say you donated $X last year and want to give a little more this year but haven't decided exactly how much yet. But you also want to offset your meat consumption this year, which is an additional $22. Whatever amount $Y you decide to donate this year, it's hard to tell whether you wouldn't have chosen the same $Y without the moral offsets. If you give to carbon offsets, that's a cleaner psychological separation. If you've made a Giving What We Can pledge or something similar, it's easier again.
It's kind of a stupid argument, because it's really just a psychological effect, but for the reasons Scott described above, it's important because offsetting really only works if you do the offsetting.
Still, I think giving to the absolute best charity (or a donor lottery or whatever) you can think of and using the carbon offsets as a lower bound of how much you should give is a good idea; at least if you're mostly utilitarian like me.
yeah, i've thought about this too. this seems related to kahneman's mental accounting theory. people generally account (financially, or morally) within a certain context, and prefer to be net positive within that context. of course a bunch of local optima don't necessarily add up to the global optimum. it could be that this is a good practice in practice, due to it increasing one's motivation to do good or something like that, but in theory, with rational agents, it should always be better to optimise the global, context-independent utility, as you point out.
=> https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/mental-accounting/
If I've listened to a favourite album dozens of times on a streaming service, I feel some moral pressure to support the band by buying the album. But then I think, well, if I'm trying to act morally, I could do so much more good if instead of buying the album I sent the $10 to an EA charity. But sending $10 to Africa to buy mosquito nets because I like an album a lot feels completely bizarre (plus, as you point out, it gives me a psychological excuse to donate less later on). So I end up doing nothing. I still haven't really resolved this in my own mind.
Why not just stop eating meat altogether? No need to pick the lesser of two evils if you can root both of them out.
Because people like eating meat and crossing your arms and huffing at them has proven an ineffective strategy.
Basically this. I like eating meat, but eating less chicken is easy compared to not eating meat entirely.
Red meat like beef is considered more carcinogenic than white meat like chicken, I believe. So I have a huge selfish motive to eat less beef than chicken.
Well, a small one - the difference isn't large at all.
One could argue that consciousness actually scales *exponentially* with neuron number, since there is some network effect going on there. If that is the case, eating 0.5 cow is much worse than 80 chickens, morally speaking.
> We calculate it out and find that eating chicken only causes the equivalent of $1 in damage (since Yog Sothoth eats only one extra galaxy, and we can save one galaxy for a dollar). The implied moral is "Go ahead and eat chicken, it only does $1 worth of damage and that's not much". But actually, it causes an entire galaxy full of intelligent beings to die.
Your error is in assuming that $1 is the market price for a galaxy. That may or may not be the price of saving the marginal galaxy, but the market is obviously not clearing at that price: more galaxies would gladly pay $1 not to be eaten than are doing so. This construct can only exist temporarily, such as if the charity were not yet well-known.
To extend the example to your chicken-suffering-versus-beef-offsets, the problem is worse: you're not valuing the direct value of the benefits. You're finding a value about how much other people would altruistically pay to stop a harm that (especially in the case of the chicken) does not directly affect them. To put it cinematically, "your money or your life" has a different weight than "your money or *his* life."
Now, assuming all of these offset programs are above-board, you as an individual can balance the moral scales (in some sense) by in fact making the offsets. In that case, you're comparing like against like, and you're at a Pareto optimum: neither the rate of chicken suffering nor the carbon content of the atmosphere would increase.
In using altrusim prices to make the argument, however, you are no longer operating in a Pareto framework. Something will be made worse for your actions. And those market prices do not reflect the real value of mitigation or the subjective value to the victims, but the altruistic value to third parties. Don't be a status-eater.
As another point:
> Second, most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems.
This is not in fact true. As far as we can tell, the human cost of climate change is increasing on the margin. The incremental harm of going from 4 to 4.1 degrees of warming is much worse than the harm of going from 2 to 2.1 degrees of warming.
If you think that your emissions would not be replaced on the margin, then reducing them is *more* beneficial if you think that the world will not effectively coordinate. The bigger trouble is in evaluating whether emissions will be replaced, since if you are making this decision in a market framework (e.g., taking an unnecessary drive and filling up the gas tank as a result) then prices will change causing others to change their behaviours.
I'll note that carbon offsets do not yet have this problem, since for now the area appears to be demand-constrained with little offset-price-effect on the margin.
Ascertaining whether emissions will be replaced at the margin is indeed non-trivial. I note that many commenters here tend to assume that personally reducing emissions is likely to, on-average, make no difference, because The Market will do its damnedest to price signal at someone else to buy it. (see comments addressing this through demand elasticity at https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2092992 and https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/moral-costs-of-chicken-vs-beef#comment-2092664 ) Other effects are conceivable: As a good becomes less consumed it may achieve fewer economies of scale; as a good becomes less fashionable it may be consumed less. Higher order effects are also conceivable, if unlikely; e.g. as a good becomes less fashionable, state actors may be more willing to reduce subsidies and tax concessions to the companies that produce it, or increase regulation, and thereby increase the cost further. Marginal contribution to any of these effects is tricky to estimate.
Slightly related, the question of whether marginal consumption effects are even comparable between chickens suffering and carbon(-equivalent) emissions. This thing:
>Second, most likely anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all; either very large-scale actors like states and corporations will fail and there will be various disasters, or the large-scale actors will succeed and we will escape most problems. Meanwhile, if you don't eat some chickens, those particular chickens don't get eaten.
I get a lot of this in discussion. I disagree, I think these two types of harms avoided are qualitatively similar in the marginal effects of personaly, but this might reflect my personal assumptions about the distribution of outcomes, which are tail-risk sensitive.
More concretely, the effect of changes in marginal chicken consumption I think we tend to model as a low-ish variance negative-mean increment in the total amount of chickens killed. The effects of emissions reduction could be something like that, or the total expected effect could be dominated by the tails of the effect distribution, if we imagine low-probability but large effects such as successful state coordination could be influenced by consumption choices. Or, more plausibly, it could be a mixture of these two types of effects
I think if you care about specific quantiles of these effect distributions, they could seem qualitatively different, but my instinct is to think about them both through something like the expected (in the sense of mean) suffering incurred, in which case the marginal effect looks similar in kind. I think Scott's argument that they are different makes more sense in the light of, say, median, rather than mean, suffering incurred, under the additional assumption that the expected increment has mean zero because elasticity. Recommended edit if this is correct would be something like
>anything you personally do to prevent global warming won't matter at all, with respect to the median outcome, (although it might effect the mean)
I don't at all understand why the relationship of consciousness to cortical neuron count is assumed to be linear. My prior would be that it is anything but. A network of ten neurons can assuredly not be conscious in any meaningful sense, no matter how you adjust the connection weights. Saying that ten billion such isolated systems have the same consciousness measure as an adult human seems obviously silly.
The Gödel Escher Bach approach of relating consciousness to self-modeling would also suggest this. Some threshold of neural complexity needs to be passed for such modeling to become a realistic possibility. It’s not going to be a discontinuous jump in the “consciousness function”, but it might be a sigmoid-like curve. The question then becomes: What is the slope of that sigmoid? Where on the neuron count scale is the mid point located?
I have no idea. But I don’t think you can just assume chickens and cows are both on the slope, rather than stuck at “basically 0” or “basically 1”. Let alone that they’re both on the slope, and it’s shallow enough that you can just fit a linear function to it.
With our current limited knowledge of consciousness, I don’t think there’s a good answer to this. But where I’d start is looking at actual animal intelligence experiments, rather than neuron count, and try to figure out a likelihood ratio between chickens being conscious and cows being conscious from that.
I’m far from an expert on animal intelligence, but I was under the impression that cows tend to perform far more impressively. A likelihood ratio of 1000+ in favour of the cow doesn’t seem totally ridiculous to me. Which would tilt the math to eating chicken being better.
Scott, I love your writing. Every now and then one of these posts reads like a parody of the rationalist movement though
Interestingly, while this discussion is about chickens and cattle, where you can make some pretty decent arguments about suffering either way, the case where it seems absolutely clear-cut would be swine vs. cattle. Not only do the pigs weigh less, they're _also_ more cognitively advanced and presumably more capable of suffering.
So if you want to go on a meet selection crusade, definitely start by getting rid of pork - that's the no-brainer under this line of argument.
Unfortunately pigs also produce less methane so it's still not as clear cut.
"Unfortunately". :-)
One further (albeit a bit complicated) argument in favour of chicken over beef: it's the best choice in the possible states of the world that are most unfavourable to meat-eating, so the best response to uncertainty.
TL,DR; the beef over chicken policy is the best idea in worlds where the differences in moral value between different animals are smaller, which is also the world where the difference in moral value between humans and other animals is smaller, which is the world where animal lives matter the most.
Longer:
Dan Dennett, Eliezer Yudkowsky and Descartes could be right that moral value more or less 0 below the point where first person experience occurs and a constant value above it, and first person experience isn't very common in animals - so Chimps, Dolphins, babies past a certain age all matter about the same and no other animals do. In which case, eat whatever you want.
OTOH, Jeremy Bentham and Peter Singer could be right that first-person experience isn't the key thing and in fact it's capacity to feel and react to pain that matters, in which case there's a sliding scale of moral value that we can scale with neuron count or something similar, such that a Human doesn't matter millions of times more than a chicken, but maybe only tens to thousands of times more, so there are no sharp declines of moral value with brain complexity.
What's key is that between these two, is a VERY wide range of possibilities. We basically know that human lives matter most, and the question is how the curve looks 'behind' us - does it drop off almost straight away after Chimps or decline completely smoothly, reaching near 0 only at sea sponges and nematode worms?
So there a range of graphs over hugely different orders of magnitude, all the way from a completely flat increase of moral value where the most and least complex animal life aren't all that different (so my life only matters 10 times more than an insect) to a very hard 'exponential' increase where my life, or a chimps, matters a million times more than a dog. Not all of these are equally plausible, but the best argument for caring about animal lives is that considering how horrible factory farming is, most plausible settings of the numbers that aren't just 'animal lives don't matter at all' say it's a bad idea, and it's not that plausible that animal lives don't matter at all.
Here's the bit that's relevant to chickens vs cows - the more carnivore-friendly models of the world are ones where animal lives matter much less than humans - these are ALSO ones where there's a much steeper drop-off past humans because the moral value of animal lives depends on much more sensitively on brain complexity.
In a world where a cow's life matters 1000x more than a Chicken's life, so the climate maths doesn't work out in favour of eating beef over chicken, it's probably also true that a cow's life matters >1000x less than a human life, and so eating meat isn't much of a big deal in general.
Whereas if you think that a Cow's life matters only 2x as much as a chicken's, so the climate maths works out well for eating beef over chicken, that's probably a world where the decline in moral value with capacity to feel pain/brain complexity is much flatter IN GENERAL, so eating meat is morally much worse in general.
I shall explore this somewhat further when I am not also working, but I do wonder if there is a role for a component that honestly weighs heavy in the decisions I make about what to eat:
Is the animal a jerk?
Chickens? Jerks. They'll peck each other to death and stomp on the corpses.
Young male lambs? Jerks. My godfather takes a shovel in with him when dealing with his ram so he can hit it in the head. The ram ignores anything less, and is quite aggressive.
Steers? Often dicks, though not always.
Pigs? Not necessarily dicks. In fact, can be downright pleasant.
I think, all else being equal, it is definitely better to eat nasty animals that are mean to others than to eat ones that are nice and pleasant to all other creatures. Though on another level, should we let the nice ones have a brief, pleasant existence before we eat them?
maybe part of the reason factory farmed chicken exhibit anti-social behaviour is because they are packed insanely tight and live their whole lives under a lot of stress? factory farmed pigs also exhibit anti-social behaviour, by the way, including biting each other's tails off, which is why their tails are often docked without anesthesia (so they don't get wounds that might then get infected -- it hurts profits).
is your point that chicken "deserve it" because some of them do these things? because if not, your eating factory-farmed chicken will lead to there being more chicken in crowded factory farms, which means there will be more anti-social behaviour, and therefore more suffering, both for the anti-social chicken and for their victims.
re-reading that post, it sounds a bit more adversarial than it ought to. please consider it edited accordingly.
Most of what you call ‘anti-social’ behaviour in chickens isn’t something created by factory farm conditions.
I keep chickens and they live a care-free free range existence (until I cut their heads off) and they are quite capable of pecking each other to death. Sibling on sibling, mother to daughter - they don’t care....
Having said that, there’s always a reason- usually an injury. Or because there are too many cocks for the number of chickens.
On a more general note, it doesn’t make much sense to me to talk about the suffering of chickens or cows. Unless of course you choose to buy them factory-farmed in which case your moral compass is already quite squiffy..
No trouble. I'm not referring to factory farmed chickens, though. While ours were not free range, they had a large coop with attached outdoor area which did not allow things to eat them. They were still nasty little jerks who would on occasion peck each other to death. As Anteros said, they don't care. Honestly, the behaviour of chickens is one of the things that makes me willing to believe dinosaurs turned into birds.
I despise battery cages. Unnecessary cruelty is bad. But chickens can be pretty cruel themselves, and so letting them lead a reasonably comfortable life then eating them seems somehow more OK to me than eating a nicer animal. The same goes for geese, as an aside. Not sure about ducks, but given the behaviour of other poultry I assume they are jerks until someone shows me otherwise.
I think it's largely because it makes me feel less empathy for them than I would for a nicer, cuddlier, kinder animal. Then again, I'm not sure that's not as good a reason as being worried about the QALYs of cows vs chickens. It's probably more quantifiable.
yeah, i see your argument, though i think it's flawed. specifically, i don't think it makes sense to judge non-human animals at all based on how they behave, or at the very least not to treat them better or worse depending on how they behave, for the simple reason that they have no choice to behave the way they do -- unlike humans, they are not aware of the reasons for their actions, and cannot choose differently. so it seems unfair to chicken to blame them for acting the way they do, for the same reason that we are more lenient to severely mentally ill criminals or misbehaving children.
*no choice but to
If they're unthinking creatures of instinct with no control over their actions, it doesn't seem to matter much if we eat them, as long as we do so in a minimally cruel way. We're basically eating a machine.
Also, while I never noticed much personality in chickens, almost all other animals I've dealt with (or known people who deal with) have at least some amount of disposition. There are mean ones and nice ones. Any animal aware enough to be trained is aware enough to control its actions to at least some extent.
> If they're unthinking creatures of instinct with no control over their actions, it doesn't seem to matter much if we eat them, as long as we do so in a minimally cruel way. We're basically eating a machine.
matter to whom? surely it matters to the animal we are killing? if you think that animals, like machines, are not at all sentient or aware, then that is our crux.
> Any animal aware enough to be trained is aware enough to control its actions to at least some extent.
i don't think this is the animal being aware of the reasons for their actions, i think they are still only responding to stimuli, only it has learned to respond differently to those stimuli through positive or negative reinforcement.
How can something be said to matter to them if they're just collections of unthinking instinct with no control over their actions? That's like saying my eye cares if you poke it and it reflexively shuts.
As to being aware of the reason for their actions, I've definitely seen my dog consciously choose to ignore me. He is also a jerk, though I will not eat him.
> Honestly, the behaviour of chickens is one of the things that makes me willing to believe dinosaurs turned into birds.
Complete tangent here, but dinosaurs were just animals, not terrifying fantasy monsters. We've got no reason to assume that they would be any more or less aggressive than modern animals.
As in they act like big lizards with pointy teeth, in a way crows (for example) don't.
The reasoning seems spurious to me. Chicken, cattle and pork make up a huge proportion of the animal biomass on the planet specifically because they are bred for food:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/25/6506
Chicken make up 3x the biomass of all wild birds combined, and cattle make up almost twice the biomass of humans and 14x more than all wild mammals combined.
You can't "save" chicken by offsetting, because there is no wild population of chicken to save, and if there were, it would not be in anywhere near the volume needed for effective offsetting. So unless we start devoting even more space for chicken or cattle as ornamental pets (presumably at a cost orders of magnitude higher than battery-farmed chicken or cattle), the supply of offset credits would simply limit to a tiny elite of virtue-signaling rich people.
The point as I understand it is not to "save" chickens by instead allowing them comfortable existences, but to "save" them from terrible existences followed by being eaten. At some level of suffering, existence is presumably worse than nonexistence, so having fewer suffering chickens would be better.
This applies less to animals whose lives aren't so unpleasant that they're a net moral loss, but the premise is that on the whole, factory-farmed animals' lives are worse than nonexistence. For chickens at least, it's hard for me to see that not being the case.
So how does this offset work? Pay someone else not to eat chicken? I can't stand chicken anyway, so sign me up for some free money for not doing something I would not do anyway! I'll spend it on beef steaks.
My best understanding is that it's an estimate based on the impact of outreach attempting to influence people's dietary decisions (promoting reducetarianism, vegetarianism, etc.) on people's actual food consumption, per dollar invested into outreach. So if you spend a few hundred dollars trying to persuade people not to eat chicken, that may save a few chickens over the course of the year, aggregated over all the people the messaging reached.
Personally, I'm extremely skeptical of treating this sort of intervention as a moral offset. First, because it seems unlikely to scale well; if a bunch of people start putting out messaging to convince people to reduce meat consumption, pretty soon they'll persuade all the people who constitute low-hanging fruit, and the costs to persuade anyone else will go way up. And second, because, well... it kind of seems like a direct investment into hypocrisy, in a way that buying carbon offsets doesn't. You're basically paying for the propagation of an argument that doesn't persuade you to modify your behavior, in the hopes that it will persuade other people to change theirs so that you don't have to.
Pricing carbon offsets into meat could be generalized across the whole market to make the industry carbon-neutral. It'd make the meat considerably more expensive, because the meat industry produces enough CO2 that it'd probably exhaust the lower-hanging fruit for carbon offsets and drive up the price of those a lot, but it's certainly doable in principle. Generalize this across enough industries, and at some point, rather than paying for reduction of CO2 generation somewhere else, you're paying for increase in carbon sequestration.
Pricing outreach for reduction of chicken consumption, or the consumption of any meat, into the cost of the product, fundamentally doesn't make sense in the same way. It's ultimately self-defeating.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isj-IYeCbnI
The above is a training video from the Australian cattle industry about how to humanely process cattle for slaughter. It is worth a watch. Obviously, includes a stungun firing a bolt into a cow's head, and a cow getting it's throat cut.
Having watched it, I am fairly confident that the cow likely doesn't know what's going on and is dead quickly and humanely. I wouldn't want to work in a slaughterhouse, but if you made me watch the slaughter of every animal I eat I probably could.
I would suggest it for people. I definitely learned something about myself watching it.
Well of course the training video is going to portray things going cleanly and neatly. In reality it seems failures do often occur - as shown by the video's casualness when it comes to the matter of restunning!
No one would think of using a training video to prove how safe a workplace was in reality - why do it in a situation where workers have significiantly less incentive to follow the rules?
By the same logic, "of course" videos by people trying to show people the meat industry is inhumane will show things in the worst possible light. This is the inverse of that to at least some extent. At the same time, it's clearly straightforward enough to do that I am prepared to believe claims that the failure rate is low.
As to having significantly less incentive to follow the rules: what advantage do slaughterhouse workers gain by NOT killing cattle quickly and humanely? Getting covered in blood and listening to terrified lowing, followed by having to deal with a bunch of panicky multi-ton animals is not a fun time.
Also, which step are they going to skip? Not restrain the cow? Good luck. Not stun the cow? Good luck. Not cut the cow's throat? Seems tricky to kill it most other ways.
Also also, your argument that we can't trust the training video because failures are common seems rather contradicted by your immediately following comment that we can tell this because the video is casual about one of the kinds of failure.
"By the same logic, "of course" videos by people trying to show people the meat industry is inhumane will show things in the worst possible light. This is the inverse of that to at least some extent."
I don't see what that has to do with anything. One source being biased does not mean that you can blindly believe sources that are biased in the opposite direction.
"At the same time, it's clearly straightforward enough to do that I am prepared to believe claims that the failure rate is low."
A 2013 study of a Swedish slaughterhouse found that 12.5% of cattle were inadequately stunned, and they quote other studies that cite similar figures. Around 5% of cattle showed SQR3 symptoms after the first stun - the most serious category of stun failure. These numbers get higher if the slaughterhouse does not use head restraints, which is still common.
"Also, which step are they going to skip?"
Steps that probably do not directly affect their safety and are primarily to make the killing process more humane. From watching the video, the following would seem to fall into that category:
-Using minimum coercion to move cattle
-Not forcing cattle into the restraining device or leaving them trapped in it
-Fully checking that the cattle is unconscious after stunning
-Fully checking that the cattle is dead before beginning meat processing
And, of course, people break workplace rules designed to protect themselves all the time...
"Also also, your argument that we can't trust the training video because failures are common seems rather contradicted by your immediately following comment that we can tell this because the video is casual about one of the kinds of failure."
I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here.
"I don't see what that has to do with anything. One source being biased does not mean that you can blindly believe sources that are biased in the opposite direction."
First, it doesn't mean the level of bias is equivalent. Second, if you want an idea of what happens in slaughterhouses those are more or less the two options. This seems likely to be more accurate than videos designed to convince people slaughterhouses are awful, since it is an industry training video posted on Youtube rather than a video designed specifically to convince people of the evils of an industry.
The Swedish study you mention (assuming I found the same one - it is not good form to not cite sources properly) also notes that the solution to inadequate stunning was to stun them again in some cases. Y'know, that thing the video shows. It is not clear from what I can find what percentage were inadequately stunned, or exactly what that means, how it was handled, and whether restunning worked.
I note that you have not explained what, in fact, the slaughterhouse employees get out of slaughtering large potentially dangerous animals ineffectively. This is an important component - yes, it is possible to skip smaller steps. It is still very much in the slaughterman's interest to make sure the large potentially dangerous animal is dead to the world before trying to stick a knife in it.
"I literally have no idea what you are trying to say here."
You are claiming we can't trust the training video to be honest about mistakes being possible...because mistakes are included in the training video. This is contradictory.
"since it is an industry training video posted on Youtube rather than a video designed specifically to convince people of the evils of an industry."
It's an English dub of a training video intended for Vietnamese workers, posted on a YouTube channel made to promote Australian farming. PR was evidently a concern.
"also notes that the solution to inadequate stunning was to stun them again in some cases. Y'know, that thing the video shows."
I don't see what that's got to do with anything. The point is that not every cow dies quickly and humanely.
"It is not clear from what I can find what percentage were inadequately stunned"
12.5%, the number I gave you that is also in the abstract.
"or exactly what that means, how it was handled, and whether restunning worked."
The paper gives full details.
"I note that you have not explained what, in fact, the slaughterhouse employees get out of slaughtering large potentially dangerous animals ineffectively."
Speed. As you admit, some steps are only "effective" in that they improve animal welfare. And even when there are safety concerns, to deny that people break the rules in the interests of saving time and effort is ignorance in the extreme.
"You are claiming we can't trust the training video to be honest about mistakes being possible...because mistakes are included in the training video. This is contradictory."
I never said the training video was lying about the possibility of mistakes. I meant that it is weak evidence in proving that following the procedures is the norm and not following them the aberration.
"I don't see what that's got to do with anything. The point is that not every cow dies quickly and humanely."
...Because a re-stunned cow still can ultimately end up being stunned?
"12.5%, the number I gave you that is also in the abstract."
Since my previous comment was not sufficiently straightforward enough for you: either provide a link to what you are using, or pike off. Seriously. I can find references to it by googling, including copies of the abstract, but not the full text. The abstract is not sufficiently clear about several of the things being measured for me to be sure exactly what the measurements mean, and I'm not debating further about your interpretation of something you are not sharing.
"Speed. As you admit, some steps are only "effective" in that they improve animal welfare. And even when there are safety concerns, to deny that people break the rules in the interests of saving time and effort is ignorance in the extreme."
You keep glossing past the bit that an inadequately stunned animal is a dangerous animal. A cow can absolutely kill a man. A spasming, poorly stunned, angry or panicky cow could or maim several. While I am not suggesting that slaughterhouses are perfect, your apparent claim that normal practice is to be careless of animal welfare is not apparently justified by the study you are referring to or by common sense.
I am aware that the US meat packing industry routinely wrecks things in defiance of common sense. All kinds of US industries routinely wreck things in defiance of common sense. This does not invalidate industry, except possibly by Americans. But there is a difference between the question "is slaughtering of animals acceptable at all" and "is slaughtering of animals meeting the standards we have set." The video answers the first question fairly well, in my view.
"I never said the training video was lying about the possibility of mistakes. I meant that it is weak evidence in proving that following the procedures is the norm and not following them the aberration."
A quote: Well of course the training video is going to portray things going cleanly and neatly. In reality it seems failures do often occur...
That's you. You do realize that the things you've previously said remain visible, right?
This problem reminds me a lot of Alasdair MacIntyre's critque of 19th Century Utilitarianism in _After Virtue_ Ch. 6 "Some Consequences of the Failure of the Enlightenment Project". Somewhat more than most things, it's probably a bad idea to jump into the middle of that without knowing the context within the larger argument and work itself (Utilitarianism isn't even the focus of the book). But, to throw in a piece anyway: "For different pleasures and different happinesses are to a large degree incommensurable: there are no scales of quality or quantity on which to weigh them. Consequently appeal to the criteria of pleasure will not tell me whether to drink or swim and appeal to those of happiness cannot decide for me between the life of a monk and that of a soldier. / To have understood the polymorphous character of pleasure and happiness is of course to have rendered those concepts useless for utilitarian purposes... it follows that the notion of the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a notion without any clear content at all. It is indeed a pseudo-concept available for a variety of ideological uses, but no more than that.(MacIntyre - After Virtue, Third Edition, Ch. 6, p.64)
One I always wonder about with this kind of domestic animal problem though: what's the proposed alternative for these particular animals that are not getting eaten? In the short term, I suppose a bunch could just be set free into the wild. Maybe at least some of them would survive for a while in a sufficiently abundant area, maybe there would even be some feral herds that linger. I'm doubtful there would be the same number of said animals in existence in the long run though, and if that is the case, the question is was avoiding suffering so paramount that existence existence or at least life should be forgone? Perhaps we could consider that all the matter that made the chicken or the cow would still exist, and from one view that's equivalent, but then it's hard to figure out why that set of atoms existing as dirt or suffering as a plant rather than as a chicken is particularly better. That's not to say we shouldn't care about suffering, but I think there's a lot more questions to be asked and answered on this kind of problem, and perhaps the framework needs to be scrutinized more.
I haven't heard mention of that book in 35 years, what a remarkable hoot from the past.
There is certainly a problem of polymorphism. For Carl Lewis, 10 years of deprivation (of a normal life) + umpty hours of grueling physical training + 10 seconds of winning Olympic gold >> 0. For most other people, the same sums up to << 0. And we can go on and on. How are we *ever* to be able to add up sums like these in any general way? There seems almost no metric that applies across the board to everyone. You can't even say everyone prefers life to death, as there are many cases in which people demonstrate by their actions that they value certain outcomes more than their own life.
We could be like the economists, and just wave it all away by saying we all have "utility functions" and we take those as a given, and by measuring everyone's "utility" we have a transformation black box that takes actions and turns them into measures of utility, and then we can price all the actions, do the sum, and arrive at a system of ethics.
But perhaps those utility functions are *so* complex, and even so time and situationally dependent -- change with time, experience, social pressure, and even philosophical introspection -- that we end up reduced to more or less defining them as "whatever people want," either what they say they want or what we infer they want through revealed preference.
Which alas threatens to reduce the utilitarian calculus to collective hedonism: we should all do what feels the best, collectively. The greatest orgasm for the greatest number, so to speak. Which is sort of aesthetically discouraging, and moreover leaves no room for logos.
It looks like nobody has brought up the huge issue with these offset numbers, which is that "saving X chickens" actually means "convincing people to eat X less chickens". This of course has significant costs to those people.
Offsetters are simply shifting the burden of vegetarianism, plus adding the costs of charity operation (including targets watching depressing/disturbing videos).
Offsets only work if you actually consider ALL effects of the charity, not just the metrics they advertise.
>>If you eat the US average of 250,000 calories of meat per year, you can either eat 0.5 cows, or 80 chickens. <<
I never did the math, but I have thought this for years.
What surprises me the most is how cheap it actually is to offset for Co2 emissions... I really like internal combustion engine cars, and I dream about one day owning a really cool ICE car, and if this is the price I have to pay to offset the effects of Co2 emissions I don't even see how it ever became an issue.
At least in part, the low cost of CO2 offsets is due to there being a lot of low hanging fruit. If everyone suddenly got serious about offsetting CO2 I expect that price to go up by a lot.
What I like most about his post is that it has always bothered me that we have religions that won't eat pork or beef but none, so far as I know, that won't specifically avoid chicken. Could this be the birth of one?
The chicken vrs beef question is an interesting one, but in view a less important one than the standard vrs organic/free range one for the reason that I would think that more people will be inclined to switch to organic rather than choose exclusively chicken or beef
Central to the standard vrs free run benefit / cost analysis are two key considerations: 1) Do animals have "standing" in calculations over welfare and 2) The challenges in quantifying suffering and utility generally
Assuming you agree that animals have standing, then the next question is do some animals have more standing than others and if so, how do you determine these weights (as Scott identifies).
Cost and purchasing power also come into it, as arguably there is more moral imperative for someone who is wealthy to switch to free run, than someone on low income.
Utilitarianism implies a belief in Pantheism
If you care about the suffering of, say, cows, why? Are they your mother?
Some people don’t care at all about the suffering of others. These people are generally called psychopaths. If you are solipsist, it’s logical to be a psychopath. If others don’t exist except in your imagination, you should use them as you wilt.
If you are not a psychopath and care about the suffering of other humans, or even other animals, or even vegetables, why? It’s probably because you view them as other beings, like yourself. You empathize, or at least sympathize with these other beings.
Why do you care about the suffering of other beings? It’s because you consider yourself a being, right? You care about them because they are in the fraternity of beings, a club which you belong to.
What makes you both beings? You experience shit. Who experiences shit? You do. And they do.
Now, are you separate entities, you and the chickens? It’s all semantics from here down, but my macro view is beings are these things made of matter and the entity must exist within the matter. Seems more likely matter itself has qualia than that it’s an emergent quality, because it's a simpler explanation.
Scaling moral worth by (cerebral cortex) neuron count seems like a poor measure to me. By that line of reasoning we'll have to conclude whales are worth as much as a human, using Wiki's data. Orcas are worth 3 humans.
That's without getting into the fact that a lot of things are determined by neuronal connections rather than neuron count. Should we determine moral worth using the number of synapses in the cerebral cortex instead?
Scott, I think a more interesting thread might include a definition of suffering and some down-the-rabbit-hole speculation on why avoiding is preferable. It seems to me that vegans and other holier-than-thou types are striving for a kind of purity that cannot exist in the context of natural life. I mean, let's face it, if you want to minimize the suffering of animals you should develop the skill of marksmanship and become a big game hunter who only takes head shots. Wild animals don't have retirement communities. They either die of starvation (or freeze to death, or bleed out) or they get eaten (often eaten alive) by predators.
I believe that natural life is, at least in large part, suffering. Anyone who denies suffering is actually denying life in the natural world. Sorry vegans, but that combine harvesting the mega monocrop is chopping up everything from terrified fawns to snakes and birds.
People should embrace suffering. We're all gonna die anyway.
Wondering if the Straussian reading of this is that you are trolling...
From these considerations, really by far the most important thing <a href="https://www.unz.com/akarlin/animals/">is to just avoid pork</a>. Or get probably a OOM-tier reduction in cognition-adjusted animal suffering by going pescetarian.
PS. Personally I mostly consume chicken and turkey as animal protein.
The section that attempts to compare the relative moral worth of the mental life of a cow and a chicken feels extremely hand-wavy.
Shouldn't these calculations take into account wild animal deaths? There are diffuse causes that are hard to pin down, like global warming, pollution, and land converted for growing feed, but cattle ranchers kill a lot of things directly (wolves, bears, mountain lions, snakes), sometimes in really unpleasant ways (prairie dogs). Ugh and all the deer etc that get tangled in barbed wire. I guess it's grimly nice that there is less wild animal suffering per beef produced as rangeland is defaunated.
I appreciate the reasoning, if you're reluctant to eat creatures, and some of them are one meal, and others are thousands of meals... the math is pretty stark.
Maybe pilot whales are the result of a timeless evolutionary process, where they adopt decoy cneurons to defend against time-traveling rationalists who prefer whale meat over insect-based protein.
Cheap jokes aside, I do worry about moral weights scaling cleanly with cneurons. And this is something I've worried about for a long time.
In fairness, I'm also very worried I'm getting this wrong, given the amount of cycles you've spent on this too. I absolutely clicked through to read all the times you've previously discussed it, and find the surveys fascinating and challenging.
So I want to say pretty cautiously, I think I have an idea why the surveys come out that way, while not being particularly normative. But I'm still committed to thinking about this in more detail.
I'll list a few problem areas, then a possible explanation for why those emerge, and a few alternatives (none of which are particularly satisfying, but might prompt someone smarter than me to move the ball further forward.)
My initial concern is that the cneuron:moral weight analysis produces weird results at the margins. Does a whale's worth of mosquitos have any moral weight at all? Is there a Jupiter sized swarm of (galactic space faring) mosquitos we should sacrifice humanity for?
For digital intelligence, is suspending a process on my CPU similar in kind, but just not degree, to ending an AI with agency, identity, goals, a way to contextualize its own history?
Then at the other extreme, how much more moral worth does a post-singularity paperclip maximizer hold over you and me?
The extremes are relevant, because when we're talking about animals at 1-2% of our cneurons, then we are already at some intuition breaking extremes. People report feeling moral responsibility towards robots that so much as mimic human facial expressions, with the processing power of a toy. People generally feel more moral responsibility towards "cute" animals relative to "ugly" animals. They aren't great at surveys of moral weight at extremes.
I also worry about this for close comparisons. Do smarter humans hold greater moral weight than others? I can imagine lifeboat ethics situations where intelligence is the most important skill to ensure the survival of the greatest number. But as a universal principle? I can imagine somewhat more fanciful scenarios where the best person at growing soybeans, juggling chainsaws, or mixing strong drinks that appease angry aliens are the most critical to everyone's survival.
Are we sure we want to put down that dogs are *roughly twice* as morally valuable as cats, even though there's enough ambiguity in that *factor of two* difference that owners can still endlessly debate relative intelligence?
So close comparisons and extreme marginal cases both pose some problems. Yet a clear scale seems to emerge in surveys, and track our rough intuitions, with more confidence on one end.
What could cause that?
Maybe the scale is right, but there are just hard cases. A lot of hard cases clustered in those domains.
Another natural way to get those results, and those same problems, is to have a sorites paradox about a binary condition. Any bright line feels arbitrary, so you get a smooth-ish distribution in polls, with more certainty at the ends. But you're still measuring essentially a binary (or at least a very steep) condition.
To break a sorites paradox you need to think carefully about what constitutes that threshold. (Or bite the bullet and go with an arbitrary line). You'll still get probabilistic arguments near that threshold, and that's fine, but it will allow you to consider a much narrower range than "anything with any processing power whatsoever."
If reducing the firing of nociceptors is your main overriding concern, if pain signals buttress your entire morality, then ok, nevermind, this doesn't need any touch ups.
But maybe harm reduction is "mostly right," in the way that Newton was "mostly right." And now we're at the end of the paradigm runway, where new models that provide additional resolution are necessary (while sure, preserving most of the previous results).
Imagine a weird lab that ran current through isolated nociceptors. Great tragedy or no? If not, why not?
I'd propose that neurons in petri dishes have no moral weight because of larger factors, like, (a) they can't contextualize pain, or, less likely (b) they aren't part of a moral community that can engage in exchanges of moral behavior, or, Sam Harris's (c) they don't contribute to the flourishing of humanity, or, the more Stross-ian (d) they are unlikely to contribute meaningfully to maxing out the instructions per second per gram in our galaxy. A proxy for (d) might be likelihood the species' descendants will experiment with genomic editing or interplanetary travel.
None of those are problem-free, I'll admit. But any of them provides a framework you can extend to build a cutoff that falls short of humans and isn't completely speciesest, providing opportunities for promising high intelligence species like corvids, but without going all the way down the chain. This is useful if you do not believe that mere sentience, plus sufficient mass, becomes more important than sapience.
But maybe I'm wrong, and should alter my consumption based on the p() of confidence in this counterargument, which isn't stupendously high...
My personal intuition is that there is a cut off-- like chicken suffering doesnt matter 1/6 as much as cow suffering it just doesnt matter, because for suffering to matter you have to reach the complexity of a dog, I think in retrospect i mostly just wanted to eat chicken though.
I won't say the 'suffering of chickens vs cows' question is worth *nothing* but if I'm being honest I think the ecological impact question trumps the suffering question by a ratio so large we can safely round it up to infinity.
Trying to gauge the moral gravity of fewer numbers of relatively larger beasts vs greater numbers of simpler beasts (and let us note in passing that none of them are ever going to feel grief, or write histories; and their slaughter-as-opposed-to-living-out-their-lives-naturally will not leave any lasting impact on the world whatsoever) seems like exactly the kind of question a philosopher might pose as a reductio of utilitarianism because *obviously* it has no answer.
If insects are so good, why didn't the Gods demand the sacrifice of hecatombs of cicadas?
And why should the gods of postmodernity be less finicky ?
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There’s also another benefit though not all of us will see it that way. Eating a lot of red meat could result in earlier mortality, reducing social security and Medicare costs to the government.
Isn't there a health dimension to this also? Eating red meat that is typically fatty increases cholesterol, which has an impact om CO2
Why is veganism not being discussed? It is truly the superior option if trying to reduce animal suffering and environmental impact.
How does turkey figure into this? Roughly the same moral weight as eating chicken?
I just love your style m8. It doesn't matter wrong or no. That's besides the point. The themes you write on a hard per se to get right. But your style of writing is nice and good and funny in a non-funny way. Glad I have your blog to make my day!