Do Some Good Things Even If Not All Good Things

The perfect as the enemy of the good

I recently wrote an article arguing that eating honey was bad because it causes very large amounts of suffering to bees. One objection that a lot of people had was that the argument generalizes. If honey is bad because it involves bringing lots of bees into existence in unpleasant conditions, then isn’t almond, avocado, and various fruit consumption also immoral given the large numbers of bees used in pollination? But clearly we can’t be expected to stop eating all those foods!

Similarly, an objection that a lot of people had to arguments in favor of doing easy things to reduce insect suffering is that the argument for doing those things generalizes. If you should give money to Givewell to reduce insect populations, then won’t you have to turn your life upside down trying to stamp out every contribution to insect suffering? Won’t you have to go full-on Brian Tomasik?

Lastly, some people don’t donate some small portion of their money to effective charities, on grounds that there’s no reason to donate that particular amount. If they give away 10%, why not more? Why not 20% or 50%, or every penny above the poverty line? But clearly they can’t be expected to do that! So they don’t even give away 1%.

I think these objections are misplaced. It’s worth doing some good things, even if you don’t do every conceivable good thing. Even if you’re not willing to turn your life upside down to prevent every contribution you might make to insect suffering, you can still work to prevent large amounts of needless insect suffering.

Imagine you come across a career criminal. He constantly kills, lies, steals, cheats, and does all other manner of heinous crime. You suggest that he stop killing. He thinks about it, but then realizes that if he bought the argument against killing, he’d also have to stop lying, cheating, stealing, and refraining from donating to shrimp. This would be too great a cost to bear, so he keeps killing.

This would clearly be irrational. Learning that if some action X is good then some other action Y would also be good, but you don’t want to do Y, doesn’t actually give you evidence against X being good. It might make X being good somewhat inconvenient, and make you feel a bit guilty if you do X without doing Y, but it shouldn’t affect the plausibility of X. The following is not a sound inference:

1. If I should do P then I should do R.

2. But I don’t want to do R, and I’m not going to.

3. So I shouldn’t do P!

Yet this seems to be the implicit inference made by people who refrain from doing one good thing because it would imply they should do lots of other good things!

Take honey, as an example. The argument against honey is pretty simple: honey causes bees very large amounts of suffering, and you shouldn’t cause others lots of suffering for trivial reasons. The fact that these premises also imply you should change your behavior in other ways doesn’t mean the premises are false. It just means that the premises being true is inconvenient and implies we’re living in non-ideal ways.

But you shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. You shouldn’t refrain from cutting out any products that cause unnecessary animal suffering on grounds that you can’t cut out every product that causes unnecessary animal suffering. If honey, almonds, apples, and so on cause lots of needless bee suffering, it’s much better to cut out honey than to feel like if you cut out honey you’d have to stop eating any of those foods, and then not change your behavior at all. Incremental progress is a good thing!

Almonds—particularly in the U.S.—require a very large amount of pollination. More than half of bee colonies in the U.S. are used to pollinate almonds. For this reason, I pretty strictly avoid honey and almonds. As for other foods that use pollination, I try somewhat to avoid them, but am not as strict about it.

Does this make me morally ideal? No! Probably it would be better if I was a bit more careful. But it’s much better to stop consuming the products that cause the most needless pollinator-suffering than to keep eating them all. It’s better to cut out honey than to keep eating honey, even if you don’t cut out almonds.

Similarly, even if you keep eating meat, ceasing your consumption of particularly bad animal products is quite valuable. You can reduce most of the suffering you cause to animals if you stop eating chicken, eggs, and turkey. If you only eat beef and dairy, probably you’ll eliminate upwards of 90% of the suffering caused. Wild-caught fish may also be a lot less bad than other animal products.

You shouldn’t reject a conclusion because it implies that the number of things that you should do is more than the number that you’re willing to do. Instead, you should simply recognize that you’re not doing the number that would be ideal, and do some of the most important and lowest-cost things.

Similarly, even if you’re not going to turn your life upside down in an effort to reduce insect suffering, you can still have a huge positive impact by giving to organizations that reduce insect suffering (the first one I linked works on the policy end to shut down insect farming). You can still, if you’re convinced most insects live negative lives, donate to Givewell to reduce insect populations. You don’t have to go full Brian-Tomasik and start lovingly tending to bugs around your house—you can instead just do the things that are cheap and hugely impactful (benefitting thousands of insects, in expectation, per dollar).

Lastly, with regards to charitable donation, you should give away some money even if you don’t give away the perfectly ideal amount. It is vastly better to give away 10% but admit that you’re imperfect for not giving more, than to give away nothing because if you gave away 10% you’d have to admit that you’re not living up to your moral standards. It is worth doing some good, even if you don’t do every conceivable good thing.

We don’t like to do this because it makes us feel like hypocrites. If we recognize that some set of actions A, B, and C are all good, and only do A, we are not living up to our values. But it is much worse—both epistemically and morally—to decide you’re not willing to do A, B, and C, and so not even do A. It is better to have values that you don’t live up to than to reject some value proposition because you wouldn’t live up to it. None of us perfectly live up to our values, but this fact shouldn’t result in us changing what our values are.

It is better to be imperfect and recognize that than to warp your values so that you are perfect with respect to your values. Imperfection is normal and human. It is no reason for intellectual dishonesty, whereby one doesn’t admit the right conclusion even to themselves.