Isaac King's Shortform

I eat most meats (all except octopus and chicken) and have done this my entire life, except once when I went vegan for Lent. This state seems basically fine because it is acceptable from scope-sensitive consequentialist, deontic, and common-sense points of view, and it improves my diet enough that it's not worth giving up meat "just because".

• According to EA-style consequentialism, eating meat is a pretty small percentage of your impact, and even if you're not directly offsetting, the impact can be vastly outweighed by positive impact in your career or donations to other causes.
  • There is a finite amount of sadness I'm willing to put up with for the sake of impact, and it seems far more important to use the vast majority of my limited sadness budget in my career choice.
• There is no universally accepted deontological rule against indirectly causing the expected number of tortured animals to increase by one, nor would this be viable as it requires tracking the consequences of your actions through the complicated world, which defeats the point of deontology. There might be a rule against benefiting from identifiable torture, but I don't believe in deontology strongly enough to think this is definitive. Note there isn't a good contractualist angle against torturing animals like there is for humans.
• Common-sense morality says that meat-eating is traditional and not torturing the animals yourself does reduce how bad it is, and although this is pretty silly as a general principle, it applies to the other benefit of being vegan, which is less corrupted moral reasoning. My empathy and moral reasoning are less corrupted by eating meat than it would be working in a factory farm or slaughterhouse. I am still concerned about loss of empathy but I get around half the empathy benefits of veganism anyway, just by not eating chicken.

I do have some doubts; sometimes eating meat feels like being a slaveholder in 1800, which feels pretty bad. I hope history will not judge me harshly for what seem like reasonable decisions now, and plan to go vegan or move to a high-welfare-only diet when it's easier.

I don't much care about animal suffering.

Really. I am not pretending not to care for self-serving reasons. I. Actually. Do. Not. Care.

Life has not brought me any occasion to slaughter and butcher a carcase myself, but if it did, I'd be willing to do it. I am not drawn to fishing as a recreation, but I have no moral objection to it, if the catch is to be eaten. On the other hand, I would be disinclined to the sort of sport fishing where the catch is released back into the water.

I wouldn't eat primates, and certainly not humans. I wouldn't go game hunting — large fierce animals are rare enough already. People shouldn't mistreat their pets. I have no desire to keep a pet myself. I have eaten horse and ostrich. Intensive livestock farming is unaesthetic, and if people want to campaign for better conditions for the animals, I've neither a problem with that, nor any urge to pitch in.

These choices about my actions outline the extent of my caring.

Are you in favor of destroying the habits of all wild animals who live in conditions with a lot of suffering?

Or to be more concrete, if I buy meat produced by destroying the habits of enough suffering wild animals so that cows can graze in the area, do you think I have done adequate offsetting for my meat consumption?

Meat-eating (without offsetting) seems to me like an obvious rationality failure.

This poses an interesting question: Where is the difference between failures of rationality and failures of morality? No doubt there is some sort of contradiction (loosely speaking) in holding these two mental states simultaneously:

1. The belief that eating meat is bad
2. The intention to eat meat

This would ordinarily be called a failure of morality. But now compare this pair:

1. The belief that eating chocolate is bad
2. The intention to eat chocolate

Now this seems more like a failure of rationality.

Perhaps the difference is that in the first pair, "bad" means "bad overall", while in the second pair, "bad" means "bad for me". That's the difference between altruism and egoism.

While most people have super flimsy defenses of meat-eating, that doesn't mean everyone does. Some people simply think it's quite unlikely that non-human animals are sentient (besides primates, maybe). For example, IIRC Eliezer Yudkowsky and Rob Bensinger's guess is that consciousness is highly contingent on factors such as general intelligence and sociality, or something like that.

I think the "5% chance is still too much" argument is convincing, but it begs similar questions such as "Are you really so confident that fetuses aren't sentient? How could you be so sure?"

I think you present here some false dichotomy, some impartial utilitarian -ish view VS hardcore moral relativism.

Pets are sometimes called companions. It's as if they provide some service and receive some service in return, all of this with trust and positive mutual expectations, and that demands some moral considerations / obligations, just like friendship or family relationship. I think mutualist / contractualist framework accounts for that better. It makes the prediction that such relationships will receive additional moral considerations, and they actually do in practice. And it predicts that wild animals wouldn't, and they don't, in practice. Success?

So, people just have the attitude about animals just like any other person, exacerbated with how little status and power they have. Especially shrimp. Who the fuck cares about shrimp? You can only care about shrimp if you galaxy brain yourself on some weird ethics system.

I agree that they have no consistent moral framework that backs up that attitude, but it's not that fair to force them into your own with trickery or frame control

>Extremely few people actually take the position that torturing animals is fine

Wrong. Most humans would be fine answering that torturing 1 million chickens is an acceptable tradeoff to save 1 human. You just don't torture them for no reason, as it's unvirtuous and icky

Idea: it should be illegal to keep animals in captivity, so any organization that wants to butcher animals for flesh and blood should make a space that's attractive for animals to hang out so they can hunt them there.

I've been having some related discussions in this comment section: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nrC5v6ZSaMEgSyxTn/discussion-thread-animal-welfare-vs-global-health-debate?commentId=aBYj4P6JWJyyZmSEa [EA(p) · GW(p)] 

I think I observe this generally a lot: "as soon as those implications do not personally benefit them", and even more so when this comes with a cost/conflict of interest.

On rationality on decision making (not the seeking truth part on belief forming I guess) - I thought it is more like being consistent with their own preference and values (if we are constraining to the definition on lesswrong/sequence ish)? I have a hot take that:

1. If the action space of commit to a belief is a binary choice, then when people do not commit to a belief, the degree they believe in that belief is less than those who do. If we have to make it into binary classification, then it is not really a true belief if they do not commit to that belief.
2. It could be the action of a belief is a spectrum, and then people in this case for example could eat less meat, matching the degree of belief "eating meat is not moral".