Pay other people to go vegetarian for you?

I avoid meat (not vegetarian, just eat as little as I conveniently can) because of what I and my friends call the Stuffed-Animal-Principle. The idea is that it's bad utility function maintenance to allow stuffed animals to be abused. (Stanford burned teddy bears in the pre big game rally.) The idea is that stuffed animals are basically a technological superstimulus for empathy and you risk damage to your actual utility function by desensitizing yourself to that. (I don't have actual studies on the specific fact, but it makes sense with things that are known.)

Actual animal suffering is far more upsetting to actually witness. Mostly our society avoids this problem by putting it out of mind and just enjoying the results. We also do this for many problems that affect humans allowing them to continue and I really don't want to train my own ability and willingness to ignore suffering I'm complicit in just because it happens to not actually matter as much as it looks.

I have various friends who do meat limitation for this reason; one is even a full vegetarian. I have no idea how common it is though.

If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?

I would suspect that a person willing to give up all meat for $11 a year is probably already eating less meat than a person who would demand much higher amounts of money.

I want to say that I have decided to switch some of my regular fast food choices to fast food choices that do not contain meat as a result of reading this post and have added frequent reminders to my phone to help me incorporate this change. I also found while considering this that if you want to encourage people to eat no meat to earn money, you have to consider the effect of them just eating less meat to save money.

For instance, I found this idea interesting, but I was concerned about possible side effects of the decision, and then started getting into what seemed like the equivalent of bizarre ethical weeds way off of the original track of the argument.

Then I tried to take things back to the original more concretely and realized I may be able to save around 11 dollars a week just by switching my current choices at Taco Bell (which do contain meat) to Bean Burritos (Which don't, and are cheaper, and are comparably tasty) and after thinking about it figured that if the first offer was even mildly tempting, an offer which is more than an order of magnitude more financially tempting and requires significantly less effort on my part is a very easy decision to make, even just ignoring the ethics altogether.

But while I started thinking about this at all because you mentioned the moral argument side, I'm pretty sure I ultimately made my decision on the money saving laziness side. Considering this perspective does make "Cutting back meat from your diet to save money." seem to be cast as a reasonable and ethically/financially tempting middle ground for someone who did not want to move all the way to vegetarianism (for whatever reason).

Ironically, while I did move closer to your stated moral goal, I'm not actually sure if my reasoning was entirely rational. But it certainly seems to be less wrong then my previous decisions at the moment and I'm certainly curious what other people think of it.

My deontology module would complain if I spent money trying to get other people to sacrifice their own hedons for utilons, without being willing to do the same myself. It would complain so much that the guilt would feel worse than just eating unpleasant food all the time. And then with a vague goal of "probably donating enough to make up for eating meat" I would probably end up alieving that I had started eating meat just because I felt like it and the thing about saving money to donate was a rationalization, which would ruin my self-image as an altruist, and probably make me do less altruistic things in the future.

Givewell finds good charities for helping humans, but I think you can help a lot more animals per dollar, so if you are among the few who care about animals, you have a "comparative advantage" (stretching the meaning of term, I know, because it's not that others can't help animals with as small an opportunity cost as you, but that they won't) in helping animals. Low hanging fruit in improving animal lives have not been picked.

However, I'm not donating to animal-helping charities at the moment, because I think existential risk charity (actually, one existential risk charity in particular) has a higher impact.

But I still do occasionally argue with people I know in favor of vegetarianism. I've been somewhat successful. Of the people I have argued with in person for longer than an hour, one has agreed with me "eating meat is wrong," but said they would continue to do it anyway (and declined to watch the videos I suggested), one said they couldn't stop eating meat because they need it to continue being competitive at the athletics they do, but was pretty shaken (and also agreed "eating meat is wrong") (also declining the videos), one went from long-lapsed vegetarian to most-of-the-time-vegan, and one went from full omnivore to flexitarian, following my advice (based on these posts) to eat beef instead of chicken, eggs and fish. Edit: left out one, who as far as I know, is still eating meat and eggs unabated.

It's a similar idea, but one thing my partner and I have is a rule that if we eat mammals (we care more about mammals than other types of animals, although we may try extending this rule at some point), then we have to donate $50 to an efficient charity. Otherwise, we don't worry about it. The consequences of this rule is that we eat less meat from mammals, and we donate more. We also can feel good about donating, or not eating mammals, while also not feeling very restricted.

If the utility of two people being vegetarian for a year is roughly twice that of one person being vegetarian for a year, and so on, then if they're contributing money to make more vegetarians, then they'll probably want to give a lot more than the cost of one vegetarian. In practice, the marginal value of a vegetarian year changes very slowly as the number of vegetarians increases, so if a consequentialist altruist is buying vegetarians at all, they're probably buying them in bulk.

Someone who did this might also become vegetarian or vegan themselves because it was useful for personally convincing others to do the same, or in order to feel more consistent. It would also be worth it for them to change their diet in addition to contributing money if their productivity, etc. didn't decrease by more than the cost of making another person vegetarian.

Their own quality of life would not be a significant factor in itself (though its effects on how much they accomplish would be), unless they value their own wellbeing more highly than that of others, or are more adversely affected by the diet than the typical person is (for example, it's more difficult to be vegetarian if one also needs to eat a low-starch diet for health reasons). If they're paying to encourage others to become vegetarians, and also believe that being vegetarian decreases the typical person's quality of life, then they must value the reduction in animal suffering more than the benefits the other person would get from eating animal products.

I get the impression that many people go vegetarian for care/harm and sanctity/degradation reasons. The first might be somewhat fungible, but I don't think the second is.

Does eating meat require excessive amounts of animal suffering? I don't think so. The real problem isn't that everyone needs to become a vegetarian, it is the shocking and outrageous treatment of animals in the mainstream food production stream.

How would you demonstrate that you were actually doing it?

That's an interesting thought, but it makes me rather uncomfortable.

I think partly, I find it hard to believe the numbers (if I have time I will read the methodology in more detail and possibly be convinced).

And partly, I think there's a difference between offsetting good things, and offsetting bad things. I think it's plausible to say "I give this much to charity, or maybe this other charity, or maybe donate more time, or...". But even though it sort of makes sense from a utilitarian perspective, I think it's wrong (and most people would agree it's wrong) to say "I'll kick this puppy to death because I'm a sadist/a modern artist/whatever, but I'll give more money to charity afterwards." Paying someone else to be vegetarian sounds at least as much like the latter as the former to me.

I'd go vegetarian for pay. I don't eat much meat, but I do enjoy it a lot and am reluctant to stop. If you're interested, let's discuss price by PM - I won't reveal my estimate of the cost but it is in the 100 USD/year - 1000 USD/year range. I could also go vegan but price will depend on how conscientious you want me to be about it.

Edit: Offer now withdrawn

This is very frustrating. The dollar values in the post are entirely meaningless, and now the discussion here is anchored around them.

TL:DR - Assuming utility functions, if you value animals above the meat they produce, the utility from paying people not to eat them and not eating them yourself is always greater than paying people to eat meat and eating it yourself.

Here is why a person following a utility function couldn't get out of fulfilling these types of moral responsibilities by paying for them -

Killing an animal [K utils]

Eating an animal [E utils]... and the cost of acquiring the animal is included in this

So, for a "vegetarian", the relevant information is that util losses from killing an animal outweigh util gains of eating one. In other words...

K+E<0

To want to eat meat, you need to make K+E greater than 0.

Now, you're essentially proposing paying some money in order to Save an animal. Let S be the utility generated from not Killing an animal, as a function of how much you money you Pay.

S = -PK-P

Now it is true that you can generate a net positive utility by Paying sufficient money to offset K+E, and that's why this intuitively seems like a good idea...

K+E+S > 0 if P is large enough...

But here is the problem: since K+E is a negative number, not killing and eating is always better than killing and eating. In math terms -

K+E+S < S

for all "vegetarians". Therefore, no utility-maximizing agent who is currently a vegetarian is going to choose to start eating meat and paying others not to eat it.

At best, if they value animal lives above all other causes they might donate to, they would continue not eating meat and also not pay others to eat it.

The only person who would eat meat and pay for others to not eat it would be a person who 1) valued meat more than animals 2) valued animals more than all other causes they could donate to. This would be a very small set.

Still - this approach does work for humans, for the purpose of guilt-alleviation. It would probably be a net good if people started doing it - it is akin to carbon offsets,.

Wait, is the OP suggesting that the offsetting money should not go to the most effective animal outreach charities? Sure, I agree that "justice for different causes" has no place within consequentialism, but then why use the $11/year as a metric? Wouldn't it make more sense to just "purchase" the amount of utility of going vegetarian for a year by donating to the most cost-effective charity (from all causes)?

(That is of course assuming that "offsetting" makes sense within consequentialism. I think it only does so given a couple of assumptions for willpower, guilt, relief and so on.)

Additionally, eleven dollars per year won't buy you that many QALYs if donated to GiveWell's top recommendations. You'd have to value animal suffering at least two orders of magnitude less to claim that poverty-related causes dominate, and that's not even taking into account the multiplier effect behind animal charities (vegetarians creating more vegetarians) and the poor meat-eater problem).

I initially agreed with you, but am now concerned that changing other people's values in this way is inherently immoral mind-hijacking. Yes, in one sense you are just giving them more information. But the effect would not be the same if the information was merely listed, rather than accompanied by shocking videos, so it is not just information. Additionally, they've previously presumably decided not to look into the matter further,* in which case you are intervening in their mental family to undermine system 2 and support system 1. Certainly if people showed me such videos without my informed consent I would consider it hostile action.

*(if they had they were evidently unswayed by the videos and you will achieve less through repeated exposure than you might from someone who had never seen them before)

If paying for advertising costs only $11 per vegetarian-year, paying money directly to people is probably a bad idea.

If you would get more than $11/year worth of enjoyment out of continuing to eat meat, why not give $11/year to convince someone else to not eat meat for you? Or give $50/year and be on the safe side?

I don't understand what "be on the safe side" is supposed to mean in that sentence.

You are a gentleman and a scholar. Now please shut up and take my money.

The problem is that animal cruelty is not a rational reason to become a vegetarian. If we are willing to manipulate people into making choices that we deem morally superior, shouldn't we at least be doing things which encourage rational behavior?

Vegetarianism isn't really rational in the first place - someone going vegetarian in the United States has little positive impact on starving people anywhere, and the US isn't actually struggling that badly with the environmental impact of farming. Moreover, eating meat is an efficient means of getting a broad swath of nutrients and helps to ensure that children are proper fed balanced diets - people who eat meat are not terribly likely to be malnourished, while a lot of vegetarians and vegans do it "wrong", especially people who are bandwagoning.

It strikes me as a means of pretending that you are making a positive difference without actually having a positive impact on people in general, and probably having a net negative impact by encouraging terrorist groups like PETA.