Link: Rob Bensinger on Less Wrong and vegetarianism

In the comments of his post, RobBB claimed that by going vegetarian, you'll cause 1500 fewer animals to be killed than otherwise. Regardless of the exact number, it strikes me that this is a highly tendentious way of putting the issue. It would surely be more accurate to say that by going vegetarian, you will caused 1500 fewer animals to be born than otherwise.

It is wrong to call a utilitarian argument for vegetarianism "air-tight" when it doesn't even consider this point.

I don't see why you get downvoted.

I am strongly convinced by arguments for vegetarianism.

I mean, I still eat meat but that's just because of my moral decrepitude.

All the work is done in the premises - which is a bad sign rhetorically, but at least a good sign deductively. If I thought cows were close enough to us that there was a 20% chance that hurting a cow was just as bad as hurting a human, I would definitely not want to eat cows.

Unfortunately for cows, I think there is an approximately 0% chance that hurting cows is (according to my values) just as bad as hurting humans. It's still bad - but its badness is some quite smaller number that is a function of my upbringing, cows' cognitive differences from me, and the lack of overriding game theoretic concerns as far as I can tell. I don't think of cows as "mysterious beings with some chance of being Sacred," I think of them as non-mysterious cows with some small amount of sacredness.

I think RobbBB does not understand a typical omnivore's (me!) point of view. He also makes irrational conclusions about the ways to reduce the amount of suffering of (potentially somewhat sentient) animals.

Yes, cattle suffer, so do chickens, to a lesser degree. They likely do not suffer in the same way people do. Certainly eggs are not likely to suffer at all. Actually, even different people suffer differently, the blanket moral prohibition against cannibalism is just an obvious Schelling point.

So it would be preferable to not create, raise, slaughter and eat animals if there was an alternative source of meat with the same nutritional and taste properties omnivores are used to. Maybe some day. Until then we should strive to minimize needless suffering, at a marginal cost to the consumers.

So, if you are an effective altruist who includes cows and chickens in the potential list of the entities who should be protected from suffering what do you do? Write blogs aimed at an extremely limited audience who do not appear to be overly receptive, anyway? That's not very "effective", is it? How about working to develop and make feasible new alternatives to "torturing animals"? For example:

• support/participate in the research to produce vat-grown meat

• expose existing cattle/chicken abuse in farms and slaughterhouses

• support/participate in the research to develop a species of farm animals who are physically unable to suffer.

Certainly if a headless chicken can survive for a while, it should be feasible to breed/genetically modify them to not have the brain structures responsible for suffering. Or maybe it's as easy as injecting eggs with some substance which stifles the formation of pain centers.

As SSC notes,

Society is really hard to change. [...] biology is gratifyingly easy to change.

Yet I know of no effective animal altruists who spend majority of their efforts figuring out and working on the task which is likely to provide the greatest payoff. Pity.

My reason for vegetarianism is, at its core, a very simple one. I'm horrified of violence, almost by default. And I tend to be extremely empathetic. I'm emotionally motivated to treat animals with kindness before I am intellectually motivated. The discrepancy in lw might depend on personality differences. Or sometimes you can get very bogged down in the intellectual minutia trying to sort everything out, and end up reaching a plateau or inaction (i.e, the default).

First, I am not a big fan of having the top-level posts consist of nothing but a link.

Second, the article takes "the intellectual case against meat-eating is pretty air-tight" as its premise. That premise is not even wrong as it confuses values and logic (aka rationality).

Full disclosure: I am a carnivore.

Aside from painting "LessWrong types" in really broad, unflattering strokes, I thought the author made several good points. Note though that I am a ~15 year vegetarian (and sometime vegan) myself and I definitely identify with his argument, so there's the opportunity for subjective validation to creep in. I also find many perference-utlitarian viewpoints persuasive, though I wouldn't yet identify as one.

I think the 20% thing and the 1-in-20 thing were just hypothetical, so we shouldn't get too hung up on them; I think his case is just as strong without any numbers. There is some uncertainty about the continuum of animal cognition and how it relates to their capacity to suffer.

My own personal voice-inside-my-head reasons for vegetarianism can be summarized as follows: "I am an animal, but a unique kind of animal who can understand what it means to feel pain and to die and who doesn't want that to happen to himself or to any other animals. My unique kind of animal can also live a happy, healthy life at very little personal expense without causing other animals to feel pain or to die." Thus, Rob's first 4 premises (particularly 2 and 3) resonated with me.

I don't believe other animals, even other mammals, have anything like human consciousness. Nor do I believe they should be accorded human rights. But I know that at the end of the day, biologically I am a mammal; if you're warm-blooded and you've got hair and a neocortex, then I'm really going to avoid hurting/killing you. If you have a spine and a pulse, I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt.

I wonder how RobbBB, and other vegans, feel about lions on the Serengeti. When they kill gazelles, is that morally wrong? Obviously, they aren't going to be dissuaded by your blog posts, but in a utilitarian framework, I would think that suffering caused by lions' carnivorous tastes is just as "bad" as that caused by humans. Should we put all carnivores in zoos and feed them meat substitutes? Or should lions be free to hunt, regardless of the suffering it may cause the gazelle, because that's their nature?

This article heavily implies that every LessWronger is a preference utilitarian, and values the wellbeing, happiness, and non-suffering of ever sentient (i.e. non-p-zombie) being. Neither of that is fully true for me, and as this ad-hoc survey - https://www.facebook.com/yudkowsky/posts/10152860272949228 - seems to suggest, I may not be alone in that. Namely, I'm actually pretty much OK with animal suffering. I generally don't empathize all that much, but there a lot of even completely selfish reasons to be nice to humans, whereas it's not really the case for animals. As for non-human intelligent beings - I'll figure that once I meet them, or the probability of such encounter gets somewhat realistic; currently there's too much ambiguity about them.

I'm going to comment on the general issue, not on the specific link.

I'm a carnivore, so what I'm going to write is my best approximation at purging my reasoning of cached thoughts and motivated cognition.

I'm not convinced that present-day vegetarianism is not just group signalling.
Of course you wouldn't want aware beings to suffer pointlessly. But from there to vegetarianism there's a long road:

• you should at least try to argue that it's best to never be born than to be born, live a few pleasant years and be killed;
• that me not eating meat is the best way to stop animal suffering, all else being equal, rather than say lobbying for passing a law that prohibits intensive farming;
• that not eating meat wouldn't hurt humanity in the long run (the fact that vegetarians need creatine supplementation to be intellectually on par with carnivores is especially frightening for me).

All these points are taken from granted in the article, but they are far from being so.