Vegetarianism

Vegetarianism feels to me kind of like an issue where bike shed arguments are rampant because everyone eats and everyone wants to be moral and "how hard can it be to decide what to have for dinner"? So everyone has an opinion... and feels entitled to speechify about it :-)

In the meantime I suspect that if there is a correct answer here (like there is some kind of diet that simultaneously optimizes moral, health, economic, social, and deliciousness issues) it probably doesn't exist yet and could take decades of research to properly nail down. Maybe some sort of vegan school would actually make sense, rather than just being a fun joke? But if a vegan school makes sense then non-experts who talk about the subject are likely to be spreading BS...

And in the meantime there's this huge number of moral prerequisites to being right about moral vegetarianism that I'm just not sure about. Despite being opportunistic omnivores rather than obligate carnivores, humans are the apex predator of the planet. (This isn't quite as weird as it seems, because for a while grizzly bears occupied much the same niche in north america.) As far as I can tell, this makes humans (not otters or sea urchins) the ultimate de facto keystone species of the planet. We sometimes eat sea urchins and wear otters -- hence regulating the size of such populations, thereby determining the functional modes of the global ecology.

Supposing that there was something (vampires?) that preyed on humans and that we had absolutely no pragmatic recourse against these new apex predators (imagine saying "don't eat me!" to a nano-wielding fusion-powered super-intelligence that likes eating humans for some reason) what policy for the consumption of humans would we hope that they adopted? Do we want them to start eating human shaped tofu and relegate humans to zoos and textbooks? Do we want them to bioengineer brainless human-flavored vat steaks and let wildtype humans go extinct? Do we want them to give us adequate human lives and then eat us in our 40's before our flavor goes off? Do we just want them to figure out what maximizes the happiness/virtue/number of vampires (maybe re-engineering themselves to eat algea and wheat and putting every calorie that strikes the planet into the production of this food)? Do we want them to manage wild human populations such that global biomass and biodiversity is maximized? Do we want them to domesticate us via manipulation of our genetics into a variety of types designed to serve specific ends within their economy? Maybe they could offer us some kind of "minotaur feeding treaty" where we managed some of these issues ourselves in exchange for super-trinkets? Lots of those suggestions feel to me like they have good points and bad points... so framing the question this way helps me see that I don't really know what kind of global dietary regime that I really want to bring about with my food choices as an apex predator. I am confused.

In the meantime, I grew up on a hobby farm, and we gave the cows we planned to eat names like "Burger", "Choice", "Delicious", etc so that we wouldn't get too emotionally attached to them. Those cows had OK lives, and they were pretty tasty. Later, in college, I lived in a vegetarian house for a year and while I had nothing in particular against the diet (and found out that nutritional yeast is really yummy with pasta and popcorn) it seemed to me that there was a correlation between the degree to which vegetarians are hard core and the degree to which they seemed prone to cognitive dissonance and generally bad arguments. No one could really agree on the details of what should or shouldn't be eaten, which is what you would expect if no one had collected enough evidence to honestly determine a real answer on this subject.

And then on the other hand (am I up to three of four hands at this point?) it seems that dietary restrictions are a very common part of many religious communities. No beef for Hindus, no bacteria or roots or meat for Jains, no pork for Muslims, no beans or meat for Pythagoreans, and kosher laws are notoriously complex... From the outside, all of this stuff looks to me like a memetic retention mechanism for preventing people captured by a belief system from breaking bread with non-believers and thereby becoming positively disposed towards alien beliefs. If these social/signaling/affiliation processes are the real issue, then my personal meta-strategic goal is to be able to prepare food under any set of restrictions so I can invite awesome people over for dinner no matter which conducts they've chosen to play under. Also, I should be willing to eat nearly anything someone else serves me. Anytime someone I'm not intimately familiar with offers me food, whether its baby seal soup or sprouted spelt granola, the response I'd like to give them is "Thank you, that was delicious!"

I think the Newtonmas invitation was probably made in roughly this last spirit, where a group of people who know each other quite well had a party and the host solicitously offered food roughly consistent with the paleo diet (which a number of expected guests probably subscribe to), and which signals (if anything) a nominal allegiance to personal health maximization in light of a rational recognition of our evolutionary history. Given budgetary constraints and knowledge of the host and guests, it was a socially reasonable thing to do.

Which brings us back, perhaps, to the original question: If that is how menu selection worked out in that social group, does it imply some gross moral or intellectual failure on the part of the entire group? Maybe it does if some particular dietary choice seems "obviously right" but if the right answer isn't clear (which is my own sense) then I'd guess not.

This is a pretty good post -- check out Politics is the Mindkiller [? · GW] to see if you think it's appropriate for the main page. My guess is that people have avoided vegetarian posts in the past in order to avoid the controversy...we tend not to advocate for specific lifestyles on LW unless it's necessary to teach some more general, underlying point about rationality.

I eat meat only occasionally, giving weight to your reasons (2) and (3), but not (1). I think it takes quite a few farm animal deaths to add up to a papercut to a human, morality-wise.

I do find it quite interesting to see how people react when you say you don't eat meat. I'm from the midwest, and often get reactions like:

• "Wuss."

• "I am going to make you eat meat."

• "What about protein, huh?"

I don't quite understand why people are offended by my dietary choices that don't affect them at all, but I've come to think it's something like "You don't eat meat, so you must think it's better not to eat meat. I eat meat, so therefore you think you're better than me."

I get similar reactions when I say I don't drink.

"It's bad for humans." The scale on which we eat meat is demonstrably unhealthy, wasteful and recent (arising in Western culture in the last hundred years). The way Westerners eat in general is unhealthy and meat is just a part of that, but it's a significant factor.

There was a lot of discussion of nutrition a while ago. The general conclusion is that the literature is too confused to assign any one hypothesis high probability, but was leaning toward Atkins-style low-carb high-protein diets.

I have varying levels of empathy for different classes of beings (for example: my family and neighbours > people that live in a faraway and different country > my mother's cat > murderers and rapists > cows > insects > telemarketers who call during dinner to sell insurance > plants > rocks). The ordering seems to roughly correspond both to "things who are likely to be nicer towards me if I'm nicer towards them" and "genetic relatedness", both of which probably account for the evolution of our current morals in the first place.

Of course, "our morals evolved in order to fulfill goal X" doesn't mean that we should try to fulfill goal X instead of following our morals. But it explains why our moral intuitions generally have weird patterns. It' not clear to me whether that means our intuitions are something wrong, or that we should be cautious about coming up with simple rules to explain our morality.

My current position is to acknowledge that I care less about some entities than others, and that while some moral systems say that I shouldn't, those systems go against my intuitions, so it's not clear which of my intuitions or the moral systems are wrong - the fact that ultimately, moral systems aren't justified by anything much stronger than intuitions (and possibly something like game theory) is enough for me to stick to my badly-formalized intuitions for now.

Among people who are aware of some of these issues, I frequently hear the most amazingly complex discussions concerning which kinds of meat consumption are ethically OK and which aren't. The ethical systems constructed in this way can become quite baroque. Needless to say, a large degree of assuming-the-consequent is involved in creating these ethical "systems."

That is, it reminds me of nothing so much as the sort of handwaving that well-meaning people sometimes do concerning the necessity of death (recently discussed, e.g., here and here). In both situations, there's one possibility that seems too fantastic to most people to be worth discussing: in one case, that death is unnecessary and worth fighting against; in the other; that it's wrong to kill and eat creatures that can feel and suffer.

Unfortunately, the suggestion that there might be ethical considerations to one's diet is usually considered extremely impolite to discuss. Obviously, various community consensuses do arise about these things in certain circles, but in society at large there's this sense that "nobody has the right to pass judgment on someone else's diet."

Anyway, whenever I hear these kinds of contortions I'm tempted to chime in: embrace the consequences of your beliefs. On some level you know you shouldn't be killing animals and eating them. Stop it.

The same moral arguments keep cropping up in multiple threads, and responding to them all separately seems inefficient. Here's an attempt to summarize my views and head off a lot of identical conversations:

As I said before, I'm operating off of Preference Utilitarianism. I am still in the process of working through that (it's only recently that I tacked on the word "preference," I'm not 100% sure it solves the problems I wanted it to solve). But I strongly believe that the happiness and suffering of others IS important.

That is not a fact I will try to convince someone I am right about, because I don't think it's something that can be proven. But it's not a leap of faith either - it's simply how I feel. Most humans seem to feel the same way. If you don't, that's fine. But saying "there's no reason to think that" is likewise irrelevant. It doesn't matter whether there's a reason to care. All it matters is that we do. If you honestly do not feel compelled to worry about the suffering of others for their own sake, I won't argue with you. But if you DO feel compelled to worry about it, and are avoiding it because "it's just an emotion," then I think you are missing the point. At some point you need to define your goals, and figure out where they conflict with each other, and it's perfectly okay if "not cause unnecessary suffering" ends up being one the things you arbitrarily care about.

I don't really want this to turn into a discussion about morality in general. If the subject comes up in the various subthreads, please try to limit the discussion to "I do/do-not care about suffering of others" and then argue about the consequences of THAT (i.e. if you care about suffering of others, but only other humans, or some other group, explain why you draw the distinction). If you don't care about it, then the animal rights side of the issue is largely irrelevant to you and I won't press you on it.

If you want to argue about the merits of caring about others' suffering in the first place (or in particular with the statements I just made) then try to keep it under this individual reply, so it stays fairly focused and doesn't gum up the rest of the conversation.

I was particularly taken aback by the Newtonmas invitation not even mentioning a vegetarian option.

God forbid someone should offer to make free food at their expense that isn't to your taste.

Am I the only one that this presumption strikes as breathtakingly rude?

I think this is top-levelworthy as an exemplar of applying our x-rationality.

Related: a survey on dietary choices from last year.

What is the most convincing argument that a factory animal is suffering on a day to day basis?

I would note that the very act of eating is a pleasure for all creatures, and so is the process of going to sleep. I suspect the life of a factory cow is pretty routinized, such that it can learn the basic daily patterns and anticipate that it will be fed and that it will be able to rest and sleep on a regular basis. My dog is all about routine.

I wonder if there is a physiological correlate of suffering that is measurable. High cortisol? Beta-endorphins? Some change in brain structure?

If this thread can bear anything so prosaic:

On the off-chance that anyone is interested in eating more vegetarian food but doesn't know where to begin, I've found Mark Bittman's vegetarian cookbook to be pretty good. It contains hundreds of dishes, most of which have several variations. The effect of this is that you learn not just rigid recipes, but highly extensible techniques and templates. I've used this book for a couple of years and by now I improvise most of my cooking based on things I've learned from it.

A lot of us probably just call it akrasia and shrug (me included). I don't know any convincing reason for eating meat that doesn't make one immoral by usual modern standards.

Massive amounts of cows require massive amounts of grain

If that was the limiting factor I'd expect it to show up in the price of meat.

I wish TGGP was still around to expound on his Ass-Kicking Theory of Morality. But to sum it up (although I know I do it no justice) - animals have no moral weight because they have no ability to hurt us.*

Isn't this the same reason we're so worried about creating a FAI? Because we know that we won't have ANY ass-kicking-ability vs a GAI and therefor our moral weight to it will be nil. We have to impose our values onto the GAI before it is beyond our ability to hurt.

(*For simplicity's sake this ignores the moral weight that humans can give to certain animals (pets, livestock, etc) by threatening to use their own ass-kicking-ability to support the chosen beneficiaries)

On New Year's Eve this year, I made a spontaneous resolution to go vegetarian. It wasn't exactly a well-thought out rational decision; I mainly just wanted to see what it was like and if I could do it. I never really liked the cruelty argument, probably because that would entail coming to face with the fact that I was responsible for quite a bit of that cruelty. Mainly, I was interested in health benefits, and figured a good way to test those would be to become my own guinea pig. Ten days into the new year, I've only eaten meat twice (I had sushi with my brother on his birthday, and one night I was slightly intoxicated, and really wanted a bacon cheeseburger.), and it has been surprisingly easy. I still usually eat an egg sandwich in the morning for some meat-substitute protein and take some vitamin supplements until I can figure out enough recipes and techniques for meeting my nutritional requirements without. I also don't plan on turning my nose at my aunt's turkey on Thanksgiving or my dad's barbecue ribs on Independence Day, but if I could get meat consumption down to once or twice a month, it would be, I feel, a big improvement.

Anyways, the reason that I think I'm going to stick with it is that it helps me get in in touch with my body and its nutritional needs. I guess it's really more of a sub-benefit of the health argument, but even if I fell off the vegetarian wagon, I'd be better able to know exactly what my body needs, and follow through on another diet. I know for instance, when I need more protein. Also I now get the most unusual feeling, a craving for salad.

I really would like to know from other vegetarians what drove you to become one. What arguments did you find most persuasive? Most of the vegetarians I know don't do it for strictly rational reasons. A coworker of mine was raised by hippie parents and never knew any other way. My cousin has been a vegetarian since around age seven when she realized meat was animals. Some other friends of mine became vegetarians as adolescents as a way of asserting their own individual identity. I want to know about some cases of people being persuaded purely by rational arguments.

About a year ago I stopped eating mammals; for some time before that, eating them had started to make me queasy.

I do not feel that killing animals amounts in any way to murder, but I would on an emotional level feel moral discomfort if asked to kill an animal, or at least most mammals. To prevent myself from encouraging acts I otherwise don't like, I try not to take actions that ask or force people to do things I'm morally repelled by, even if that moral revulsion isn't one I have a strong argument for.

Edit: I originally wrote some defense of responsibly raised food with respect to point 3, which you actually seem to have addressed in the original post.

I believe the other issues are much more complicated than you make them seem, which is to be expected but makes convincing someone more difficult (and makes it way harder to compete against justifications of the status quo). A lot of the meat I eat I can justify from the perspective of animal cruelty (I am fine, for example,being cruel to most of the life on earth, and I am completely fine killing almost all of it), so to convince me to stop you would actually need to win the other arguments. That said, many of the things I eat are in fact inconsistent with my beliefs and I should stop. I've made a tiny effort to change my behavior, but its been basically ineffective. Now that I'm thinking about the issue rationally, I would probably have a lot more luck if I tried to somehow coerce my future self into cooperating. I think I could get friends/acquaintances to help with that...

sds

You missed valuing the lives of nonhumans.

Perhaps the intellectuals of less wrong individually have decided that they don't see animal suffering as a bad thing, or eating meat as leading to animal suffering, or any other very normal reasons for not choosing to not eat meat.
I avoid eating meat because I prefer to get a higher percentage of my calories from carbohydrates in my diet than protein and fat. But when I'm working out, you can't get a better protein-to-fat ratio than you can in meat (nuts, grains, etc. all have at least a 1:2 protein:Fat ratio, lean meat is more like 9:1, and I don't like getting my dietary protein from supplements). Which is only to say there are reasons for eating meat (I guess I only addressed reason 2, but I've thought about reason 1, and reason 3 is initially unconvincing to me, although I should do more research about it).
It seems to me that you are surprised and/or upset by the fact that other rational people haven't come to the same rational conclusions as you. What you should rather be pointing out is that this is an actual discussion that rational people should be having, and such a discussion hasn't yet happened.

If eating meat is wrong because animals suffer, is it bad to eat animals that don't suffer? Most farm animals are man-made, genetically modified by breeding, to provide food for man. I have been told that some humans cannot experience pain. I suppose that condition may occur from time to time in domestic animals. Suppose pain was bred out of animals raised for food or labs genetically modified animals to eliminate pain. Would meat eating then be less immoral? Because domestic animals are bred for food, they are highly specialized. Dairy cattle and chicken cannot survive without human assistance. A friend likes to say that a farmer is just a cow's way of living like a queen. The animals will die and be food for something. Is it morally better to let the animal die of foot and mouth and feed the death beetles instead of man? I suspect that hanging a moral issue on meat eating because of suffering is anthropomorphic to some degree. All things die and become food. Even me. To demonstrate that eating meat is unhealthy would require a sample of non-meat eating humans for comparison. Does such a population exist? My impression is that as economies have grown and more meat has been added to the diet that overall morbidity decreases. It is true that over indulgence in animal fat can cause problems in my culture but Eskimos ate nothing else for generations without ill effect. Today they get fat on sugar and starches. Is it the food that is bad or the lifestyle? Unsustainable agriculture is agriculture that drains the soil of nutritive value. In the 17th and 18th century soils all over Europe were depleted. North America was the solution. But modern farming and so-called factory farming have reversed that trend. Soils that could no longer support people are now producing excesses of crops. Instead of increasing exports, the European Union has had to mandate ‘set asides' where no crops can be grown to prevent mountains of over supply. Fact is that domestic animals have better lives and better deaths then any of their wild fellows enjoy. Fact is that a meat eating diet improves the overall health of developing nations. Fact is that intensive modern agriculture and factory farming have reduced the burden on nature and virtually eliminated human hunger wherever it is practiced. Vegetarianism is a choice but it is not a moral choice.

Personally I would prefer growing up in prison and being slaughtered when done growing to never having existed in the first place.

The consequence of eating less meat would seem to be fewer farm animals existing. It seems possible, even likely, that many farm animals suffer so much that their existence is net negative, though I find that hard to judge. But arguing that this has to be the case for any and all kinds of farming seems to be a stretch to me. If you are concerned about the wellbeing of animals buying low suffering high happiness meat and encouraging others to do likewise seems a more effective strategy than boycotting meat altogether (it might be that the resources saved by vegetarianism would allow greater gains from buying food and animal utils separately, but it's far from obvious to me that this is actually the case. Right now vegetarian dishes seem to be more expensive than equivalent dishes with factory meat for me if I factor in time, and I suspect "happy" meat is much more appealing than vegetarianism for most people who aren't already inclined towards vegetarianism).

I admit that animal wellbeing is not a very high priority for me so I'm not doing that consistently, but I don't eat all that much meat and I've stopped eating fish even though I like it more than most other sorts of meat since it's not defensible on the grounds above (I used to buy sustainably fished fish).

For the above reason I would also prefer "happy" meat to indistinguishable artificial meat with identical footprint (though since artificial meat seems very likely to have a lower footprint this is probably moot).

I'm >95% vegan for trophic and taste reasons (at many restaurants, the most palatable option includes meat; thankfully I get less than 5% of my calories from eating out). I have no strong opinions on the moral side of things.

The materialistic approach states that everything can be explained by the laws of physics, and all is caused by the interaction between the particles which compose all things. This approach is mostly accepted by the scientific community, and I believe most atheists accept it. Considering this approach, the suffering is nothing but chemical and physical reactions that occur in the central nervous system, not to mention that the animals themselves are just a bunch of particles that are not greatly different than the air itself. On the other hand, if you consider this approach, you can justify killing and torturing of humans, even on massive scales. By this approach, everything is meaningless. So how can we know what is right and what is wrong? Isn't mortality just some invention of our society to match our feelings and instincts? And if so, how can we tell what is moral and what's not? So, is suffering of animals bad? I don't think you can answer this question using rational thinking. For me, it is rational that animals are just particles that move somewhat together, and after they die the suffering they have gone through doesn't matter at all. Still, on the same basis I can conclude that it is rational to think that we too have no meaning, and I can torture someone, kill him or maybe kill myself if I feel like, and it wouldn't matter at all. I don't do it because I fell this is wrong. I don't want to be killed; I feel empathy when I see someone else is suffering and even animals suffering. When I eat meat, I don't feel any empathy towards the animal that it once was. I believe this feeling could be changed by the knowledge I acquire and the memories I have. For e.g. some people may acquire this empathy towards the animals that are eaten by them when seeing footage of how meat is produces. Others may need to go to the slaughter house itself and see it in their own eyes. Others may never be affected by those things. This is why I believe no one can determine if it is moral to eat meat or not, and therefore first issue of eating meat (1) is fully subjective, and can be change between people and even in different times in the same persons' life.

The health issue, as much as I can conclude from my own research, is highly controversial. it seems like there are health benefits in being a vegetarian or vegan, but it is also clear to me that the argument in the subject, and even scientific researches about is, are somewhat biased in accordance to the believes of the author. I did see a stronger evidence that support that there are in fact health benefits to being a vegetarian, and even more to being vegan, but those benefits are not very significant, and are probably very affected by the fact that vegetarians are much more aware of their diet and health than omnivores, and thus eat a well-balanced, healthier diet regardless to the presence of meat in their diet. There are some articles about the benefit of eating less meat, and we can also conclude it from the fact that animal products are the sole source of cholesterol in our diet, and a big source of fat, two things that are known to cause health problems such as cardiovascular diseases. In conclusion, I believe a self-aware non-vegetarian can make his diet even healthier than an average vegetarian diet (and of course by adding sport you can always be healthier). I do think lowering meat consumption is advised.

An article about vegetarian diet health implications: http://www.chiphealth.com/about_chip/documents/HealthImplicationsofVegetarianDiet.pdf

therefore, the moral issue is probably the sole issue that should be considered in becoming a complete vegetarian (I consider the economic issue less relevant, due to the controversy on its effectiveness, and the small probability it will be the main reason for someone to become vegetarian). Due to my conclusion that this issue is fully subjective and depends on the persons feelings and unproved believes, I conclude that the vegetarian issue as whole is subjective.

I myself decided to stop eating meat in Mondays for health reasons, as an opportunity to reducing meat consumption and raise vegetables and fruits consumption.