Why I'm Not Vegan

I agree that veganism is a really bad altruistic tradeoff. However, it seems to me that it is importantly different from the other examples you mention. (Ask for your drink without a straw. Unplug your microwave when not in use. Bring a water bottle to events. Stop using air conditioning. Choose products that minimize packaging.)

Maybe this is the difference: With veganism, if everyone was vegan, the problem would be solved. So if you are vegan you are doing your part, and moreover spreading the gospel of veganism is a decent strategy for solving the problem. But with climate change, if everyone drinks without straws, unplugs their microwaves, etc., the problem will 99.999% still remain. So there's something inherently silly about those behaviors compared to veganism.

I think your argument can be strengthened by multiplying all the animal-year-values by 1000 - this would yield a value of veganism of 430 $/year, which is still less than what eating meat would be worth to a typical LW user, and yields values for the worth of animals that are probably higher than what most vegans would claim.

Conditional on animals mattering, how many animal-years on a factory farm do I see as being about as good as giving a human another year of life?

This compares "giving a year of life" to preventing suffering. It's unclear to me whether you're someone who cares unusually little about animals, or whether you're someone who cares unusually much about "giving years of life to self-aware beings that form life plans." Many animal advocates (esp. ones that follow Singer's philosophy) would agree that there's an important difference between human lives and animal lives. But not that there's an important difference about human suffering versus animal suffering.

What happens after you factor in the environmental impact? Amount of water used, pollution, etc

I view the value of veganism for effective altruists as a way to purchase moral consistency. If you take animal suffering very seriously but aren't vegan, it can be a bit emotionally uneasy unless you have a strong ability to dissociate your choices. There are costs to purchasing moral consistency of course, but no more than many other luxuries.

This way of approaching veganism mirrors a countersignaling framework:

• Normal people who don't care at all about animals see veganism as a personal choice
• People who care quite a bit about animal suffering see veganism as a moral imperative, not a personal choice.
• Consequentialists who just want to reduce suffering, and are impartial to the methods they use to reduce suffering, tend to think that veganism is only worth it if the personal costs aren't high.

Tobias Leenaert has used the word post-vegan to describe the third stage, and I quite like the label myself.

Pigs: about 100. Conditions for pigs are very bad, though I still think humans matter a lot more.

Very surprised by your ratios here.

cf. the "Is eating meat a net harm?" adversarial collaboration on Slate Star Codex. Look at the surveys they ran as a benchmark.

Thanks. I found the figures on the quantity of animals needed to supply each person v interesting (I'd never seen them expressed like that before). This helps my personal (only half thought-through) position, which is:

Current factory farming of poultry is bad (if they're sentient), and maybe pigs, but well-farmed cattle and sheep seem to have a pretty fair deal. We get to eat them (and/or consume their milk/hide/wool), in return for them getting food, shelter, and veterinary treatment rather than suffering disease, predation, and starvation in the wild.

So if we can ensure (e.g. by future regulation) that all bred animals are similarly well treated, then it's a fair deal for them. They get to live at a reasonable standard, better than in the wild, rather than not exist. And for now, those concerned about it can limit ourselves to eating well-farmed beef & lamb.

To which a response I've heard is, "Oh but we can't possibly farm all the animals people would want to eat in such good conditions - there isn't space (or it would be too expensive), particularly once people in developing countries eat Western levels of meat. So become vegan instead."

Your figures suggest there would be space. (Or worst case, we could eat less; e.g. if high farming standards were regulated, then the supply would be somewhat restricted and people would have to pay more or eat less.)

Last March there was a Slate Star Codex essay you might be interested in [link] where Scott tried to compare the moral weight of various animals to the number of cortical neurons each species has on average. Those numbers don't account for suffering under farm conditions or environmental impact, but they might help refine your intuitions.

Depends. What is your objective. Every farm animal replaces a wild animal, by process of production.

Farmland takes space. Farms produce food for animals. More farmland therefore less wild animals.

Less space for wild animals more chances of extincting animals.

Every thing is a trade off.

Vegans are ethical or for health, but both stances are ethical and they are not mutually separable. If you are healthier then you are less burden on nature as well. 

If killing off people is your goal with civilizational illness such as heart problems strokes and diabetes or significantly reducing life quality and expectancy then meat is OK, but the current problem is not just meat consumption, but overall quality of food, which is partially by product of mass production and high demand which is higher than ever before. 

Your health is not something you can impact very much always, but it is always better (without ethical weights) to be somewhat healthier, if possible.

Meat is not cheap, from environmental perspective. 

Calculating the impact of meat production, by consumption alone is not the issue.

Before and after eating meat, where you get protein and fat, you also have to take in consideration what happens to nature before and after.

Only then we can have ethical stance fully meaningfully. 

I don't know how much of meat production hurts environment, but if all industries are so bad for environment, as far as I know this one is not different by much. 

Its also important to note that you are taking stance of not harming animals needlessly.

Or survival of humans?

Unfortunately these two are connected directly. 

The direct connection is simply not easy to see, because we don't yet consider it.

The connection is that eating a pig while immediately OK, in long term and context of civilized world means you expect to leave no harm to environment while demand for mean and overproduction of meat is massive.

Meat is also more demanding on refrigeration and energy. 

The animals suffer yes, but if we omit that as bad for them, but good for us we have to justify eating meat everyday, every month, every, year and so on.

If people reduce eating meat to healthy portions the demand for meat would probably go down by several multiples. 

If I remember correctly when I eat meat I could have eaten as much as 2 meals of meat per week, every day of week.

I don't think framing this problem as vegans for ethics actually makes sense in light of what the industry has now.

It simply operates on technologies that provide very little hope for better outcomes.

The problem is meat industries exist now, and need profit now, but the bad impact it has is cumulative and over many years. 

As for animal wellfare I so no point in discussing such things, as long as people agree that pigs feel pain and go through a process of life that is simply brutal. 

Unless someone can show me how long brutal life of farm pig is better than short brutal life of wild pig.

Wild animals suffer yes. But they also have function for us. 

The benefit of nature is easy to see for humans, but in sum wild animals and wild nature sustains our civilization much more than meat production.