Once again, this is a great argument against factory farms, not against vegetarianism (nor meat eating). Where I live chickens are not caged: it’s illegal. Factory farming practices should be abolished: we should ensure that domesticated animals do not suffer excessively. And between advocating veganism and advocating reducing animal suffering by changing farm legislation, I think that latter is much more likely to pay off in substantially reduced animal suffering. So you should change the focus of these essays, or else at least advocate farm legislation reform as a supplement to vegan advocacy.
40% of chickens in Europe are caged vs 60% in the US, as per Lewis Bollard on the 80,000 hours podcast. So no its not US-only; not to mention Rest of World (worse).
From a deontological perspective, it makes sense to be more unwilling to pay for a product that requires murder than a product that does not. That’s the consideration that got me to stop eating meat.
The difference is that case two isn't a given. For meat, you have to kill. For eggs, there is no hard reason one can't theoretically give a chicken a great life and let it have a peaceful natural death.
It very rarely occurs. But the fact that it *could* occur leaves a door open in one's mind that maybe it's not so bad.
Yes there's fantasy and then there's reality. The reality is that any eggs you buy in a store will not come from a chicken which has had a great life and a peaceful natural death and pretending otherwise is fantasy
As flawed humans, morality is hard and heuristics help. Paying a restaurant to put a piece of flesh on your plate is catch-fire-and-reevaluate-you’re-doing-something-wrong in a way that paying for milk is not.
People typically find it MUCH easier to be vegetarian than vegan, so promoting vegan absolutism can be counterproductive (some people will give up on trying anything if they're told they're failing at doing the best or morally required thing).
Cutting out eggs before most meat and dairy in particular makes a ton of sense, for the reasons you highlight. Lots of EAs at least (myself included) are lacto-vegetarian for this reason. It's still probably worse than veganism, you get the vast majority of the way to the suffering reduction you get with veganism.
The probably more important point is that our diets are a tiny fraction of the impact we can have on animals, and I think that the animal community has made a very large strategic mistake in focusing on vegan advocacy instead of policy solutions and corporate campaigns. In fact, there are probably lots of potential animal allies who aren't involved in the community because veganism is so expected from animal advocates (a common icebreaker question in groups at animal conferences is "how long have you been vegan").
Abstaining from animal ag makes it easier to reason clearly about it IMO, but I think we should be promoting concern for animal welfare and citizenship as a meme far more than veganism.
People may find it easier to be vegetarian, but surely a greater level of seriousness in grappling with difficult moral standards can be hoped for from readers of this blog than the average joe off the street. Bentham’s Bulldog shouldn’t curtail his correct arguments just because they might be a bitter pill to swallow for some readers.
Your problem is mainly with eating eggs, or more precisely factory farmed eggs, but there are a lot of lacto - vegetarians out there. That position seems quite defensible to me.
Really, so does restricting one's diet to beef & dairy, it's always been odd to me that more people don't go that route. "Don't eat poultry products" is also a much more palatable position to most people than "go vegan" is, I think it's likely animal welfare activists would have more success if they argued for that.
If your goal is to effectively use your effort to do good things, then it might make sense to be vegetarian rather than vegan given that the former is much easier.
A lot has changed in the last few years thanks to corporate campaigns. There is a big difference between the welfare of hens in cages and those on large pastures. This is why The Humane League is such an effective charity and recommended by ACE.
The graph is fine, while for me, the natural comparison is suffering by euro or by gram of edible protein (see “shall we eat meat”, by v. Smil). Milk is mostly water, that is why it looks so good.
I live in the Netherlands. We have more generally stricter animal laws, but more specifically around my corner is this Eco-store. They sell eggs from chickens that grow up at the forest edge, ancient genetics, spend most time outside, they let the roosters live. Quite expensive, but I think about as animal friendly as eggs can get, not much different from raising chickens with old genetics in your own garden.
I really like eggs, and have found myself to be best performing on a high energy density high protein diet. Have an extremely demanding job and have anxiety, and dietary choices really help. Plus I am a weightlifter, and dietary cholesterol is a precursor for pregnelone, important for testosterone production.
I dont eat eggs outside of my house, also not at friends, etc. Do you think my behavior is permissible?
Genghis khan eats meat, milk, and eggs. He and his tribe are healthy and strong. Yim the yogi says not to eat meat, milk, or dairy. Yim the yogis tribe are sickly and weak. One day, Genghis khan and his friends ride in on horses and kill a bunch of yogis.
Genghis wins the morality contest, because he is alive and fit, while the yogis are practicing corpse moraity.
I agree with this, but there are effectively 0 risks to your life if you start a vegan diet, unless you're mentally retarded and start eating just grass everyday. We are no longer in the state of nature for things like slavery or meat eating where we have to worry another tribe will kill us all because they have more slavery or meat eatery than us.
No disagreements really with the text, but the tag-line should perhaps remove the word "dairy"; this is an argument against eating eggs, really. One can make a very good utilitarian case for avoiding milk, but it isn't obviously inconsistent to avoid meat and eggs but consume milk.
You are using the wrong units. Mass of food produced is not relevant, but rather nutritional content, and eggs are nutritionally very dense. Also, it's just nonsense to treat hours of captivity as the same for a fish and a pig; you need to adjust for sentience.
The numbers came from the most detailed report every carried out on animal sentience, done by Rethink Priorities. I value that a lot more than one's naive intuitions about these subjects.
Well, you'll get there in time. There are some good comments on the OP, but Anatoly Karlin has written a strong extended piece on this using multiple lines of evidence, he gives pigs a score 100 times that of a chicken https://akarlin.com/animals/
I've been an ovo-lacto-vegetarian for almost a decade. I only buy myself organic free-run/free-run eggs.
I've felt bad about not being a vegan that whole time. I felt even worse about it all before I was a vegetarian. I haven't become vegan for other reasons. I was afraid to read this post because I thought it would impel me to feel more horrible, though it probably wouldn't convince me to go vegan either.
I was thinking if I read this post that I might be convinced to start eating meat against to be morally consistent, even if that'd make me a worse person, as I might then at least feel like less of a hypocrite. That's why I put off reading it for days. I'm tired of feeling bad for not knowing how I should live in other ways on top of being vegan, so I could see myself resigning to this. I could at least be confident I'm getting more of enough of the right nutrients, and live my life trying to support animal welfare in other ways without being worried about my health.
I'm not ready to go vegan and I don't know if I'll ever be. This includes health reasons regarding my more personal health needs, such as nervous system issues and multiple neurological disabilities I don't understand well. I haven't figured them out yet.
This post wasn't that moving or convincing either way, in convincing me to go vegan, or to abandon vegetarianism so a vegan like yourself might respect me more even if you'd see me as a worse person. (I could still respect you, and your disrespect of me would be sort of welcome.) This post has me thinking I should stop eating eggs, and start eating beef again instead.
Questions:
1. Should I do that?
2. How much more of my own potential physical suffering am I possibly obliged to suffer through as a somewhat disabled person were I to go vegan, for the ethical sake of going vegan?
1. Depends on where you get the beef from. If the hens you're getting eggs from are living great lives, it's probably not wrong, and eating miserable cows would probably be much worse. But if you, say, sometimes eat eggs at restaurants, and given that organic eggs aren't very ethical (pasture raised are the ones that are a major improvement), switching to beef might be a good bet.
2. I think it's hard to know and there might not be a precise fact of the matter. I'm generally skeptical that being vegan is bad for health except in very rare cases, but it's possible that one of those cases appliels to you.
How do free-range eggs factor into this? If the chickens are genuinely free-range, I don't see a problem with consuming the eggs they naturally produce. The problem is hens being kept in battery cages, so eggs that don't involve that should be fine, right?
I think that we should also weigh intelligence in these calculations as well, since @Anatoly Karlin argues that creatures with more neurons are likely to suffer more and also to suffer in more complex ways than creatures with less neurons. Fish might be confined a lot in factory farms, but they're also much, much duller than pigs are.
That's certainly debatable. In any case, the "Humane Myth" site also has information about the cruelty that occurs in supposedly humane farming practices before the animals are killed.
I agree it’s debatable. I’ll check out the other info, but my experience with these websites is they are unreliable because they are maintained by motivated activists.
This is debatable; standard eggs are the worst animal product, but there are free range eggs and milk is the minimum impact source of animal protein. So yes, “vegetarianism” is not a sensible but welfare conscious omnivorism makes sense. As an individualist concept, but also as political activism.
I agree with you (Bentham's Bulldog) partly, but I'm troubled by your exclusive focus on suffering. The core issue (for me) is that animals are sentient beings with their own interests. Using them for human ends, regardless of how we treat those animals, denies them autonomy and reduces them to mere resources for our use.
If you're not familiar with the animal-rights philosophy of Gary Francione, I would encourage you to investigate it. When I encountered his work, I switched from being a welfarist to being an abolitionist vegan.
I think it's fine to treat people and animals as ends. With people you should be wary of doing it because you're probably engaging in myopic behavior that is net antisocial (will decrease your wellbeing in the long run), but animals can pretty much never contribute to the well being of humans besides being used as ends to their goals. Plausibly this would change if we could genetically engineer them to be much smarter, but before that I don't think animals deserve any social rights like a right to being respected or whatever.
You base your claims on only one method of raising food animals. Even if you include all of the other methods, your claim of eating meat being solely about pleasure is an appeal to emotion.
To the best of my knowledge, the vast majority (over 99%) of the land animals consumed in the United States originate from factory farms, which are essentially torture chambers for animals. Therefore, it is an indisputable fact that consuming animal products causes immense suffering and pain to animals, under normal circumstances. On the other hand, it is not unrealistic to acknowledge that we consume these products primarily for minor benefits such as gustatory pleasure. Given the availability of a well-planned vegan diet that is generally considered healthy, one may question the rationale behind our continued consumption of meat. Even if there are reasons beyond gustatory pleasure, they often involve obtaining relatively minor benefits for ourselves, especially in light of the significant suffering endured by animals.
I would be grateful if you could provide specific examples of what you believe to be unrealistic or emotionally appealing in my critique of your previous statements. I see no reason to accept your response
Morality just is appeals to emotion. Purely rational beings with no emotional attachment to their own pleasure or existence wouldn't care about being tortured forever or being killed, but presumably most humans are not psychologically constituted like that.
Once again, this is a great argument against factory farms, not against vegetarianism (nor meat eating). Where I live chickens are not caged: it’s illegal. Factory farming practices should be abolished: we should ensure that domesticated animals do not suffer excessively. And between advocating veganism and advocating reducing animal suffering by changing farm legislation, I think that latter is much more likely to pay off in substantially reduced animal suffering. So you should change the focus of these essays, or else at least advocate farm legislation reform as a supplement to vegan advocacy.
Looks like a US-only issue, the EU is pretty strict with regulations. https://food.ec.europa.eu/animals/animal-welfare/eu-animal-welfare-legislation/animal-welfare-farm/laying-hens_en
40% of chickens in Europe are caged vs 60% in the US, as per Lewis Bollard on the 80,000 hours podcast. So no its not US-only; not to mention Rest of World (worse).
Yes, but the cages are regulated to 750 cm3 per chicken.
750cm^2 is 27x27cm. That doesn't sound particularly great.
You mean 750 cm^2 of floor space. 750cm^3 of volumetric space would be a 9x9x9 cm cube which would be tiny!
Incredible
From a deontological perspective, it makes sense to be more unwilling to pay for a product that requires murder than a product that does not. That’s the consideration that got me to stop eating meat.
I get what you mean, though. I’ll avoid eggs.
Consider the following case:
case one: you kill and eat a person.
case two: you torture a person, extract breast milk from them, and then kill them.
Seems like they're equally wrong. Seems just as wrong if you're paying for someone else to do those things.
The difference is that case two isn't a given. For meat, you have to kill. For eggs, there is no hard reason one can't theoretically give a chicken a great life and let it have a peaceful natural death.
It very rarely occurs. But the fact that it *could* occur leaves a door open in one's mind that maybe it's not so bad.
Yes there's fantasy and then there's reality. The reality is that any eggs you buy in a store will not come from a chicken which has had a great life and a peaceful natural death and pretending otherwise is fantasy
Yes that’s part of what I’m pointing at.
Perhaps a simpler analogy is that of murder and rape?
As flawed humans, morality is hard and heuristics help. Paying a restaurant to put a piece of flesh on your plate is catch-fire-and-reevaluate-you’re-doing-something-wrong in a way that paying for milk is not.
Dairy and eggs require murder in virtually all cases as dairy cows and calves are killed for dairy and laying hens and male chicks are killed for eggs
Sorry, killing animals is murder?
Yes obviously
People typically find it MUCH easier to be vegetarian than vegan, so promoting vegan absolutism can be counterproductive (some people will give up on trying anything if they're told they're failing at doing the best or morally required thing).
Cutting out eggs before most meat and dairy in particular makes a ton of sense, for the reasons you highlight. Lots of EAs at least (myself included) are lacto-vegetarian for this reason. It's still probably worse than veganism, you get the vast majority of the way to the suffering reduction you get with veganism.
The probably more important point is that our diets are a tiny fraction of the impact we can have on animals, and I think that the animal community has made a very large strategic mistake in focusing on vegan advocacy instead of policy solutions and corporate campaigns. In fact, there are probably lots of potential animal allies who aren't involved in the community because veganism is so expected from animal advocates (a common icebreaker question in groups at animal conferences is "how long have you been vegan").
Abstaining from animal ag makes it easier to reason clearly about it IMO, but I think we should be promoting concern for animal welfare and citizenship as a meme far more than veganism.
People may find it easier to be vegetarian, but surely a greater level of seriousness in grappling with difficult moral standards can be hoped for from readers of this blog than the average joe off the street. Bentham’s Bulldog shouldn’t curtail his correct arguments just because they might be a bitter pill to swallow for some readers.
Your problem is mainly with eating eggs, or more precisely factory farmed eggs, but there are a lot of lacto - vegetarians out there. That position seems quite defensible to me.
Really, so does restricting one's diet to beef & dairy, it's always been odd to me that more people don't go that route. "Don't eat poultry products" is also a much more palatable position to most people than "go vegan" is, I think it's likely animal welfare activists would have more success if they argued for that.
If your goal is to effectively use your effort to do good things, then it might make sense to be vegetarian rather than vegan given that the former is much easier.
Yeah, but if you're trying for maximal animal reduction at minimal cost, you should jettison eggs before most other things.
Yeah, unless you buy free range eggs. But I agree that one should not aim for vegetarianism per se but a strategic ethical omnivorism.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jan/30/free-range-eggs-con-ethical
A lot has changed in the last few years thanks to corporate campaigns. There is a big difference between the welfare of hens in cages and those on large pastures. This is why The Humane League is such an effective charity and recommended by ACE.
The graph is fine, while for me, the natural comparison is suffering by euro or by gram of edible protein (see “shall we eat meat”, by v. Smil). Milk is mostly water, that is why it looks so good.
I live in the Netherlands. We have more generally stricter animal laws, but more specifically around my corner is this Eco-store. They sell eggs from chickens that grow up at the forest edge, ancient genetics, spend most time outside, they let the roosters live. Quite expensive, but I think about as animal friendly as eggs can get, not much different from raising chickens with old genetics in your own garden.
I really like eggs, and have found myself to be best performing on a high energy density high protein diet. Have an extremely demanding job and have anxiety, and dietary choices really help. Plus I am a weightlifter, and dietary cholesterol is a precursor for pregnelone, important for testosterone production.
I dont eat eggs outside of my house, also not at friends, etc. Do you think my behavior is permissible?
Genghis khan eats meat, milk, and eggs. He and his tribe are healthy and strong. Yim the yogi says not to eat meat, milk, or dairy. Yim the yogis tribe are sickly and weak. One day, Genghis khan and his friends ride in on horses and kill a bunch of yogis.
Genghis wins the morality contest, because he is alive and fit, while the yogis are practicing corpse moraity.
It’s true. Because Genghis mercilessly slaughtered and raped the most people, he’s the most moral person ever.
Wait a sec…
Dead people don’t get to write morality.
Yeah, this is like the Pompey argument: "You quote laws to us who have swords?"
I agree with this, but there are effectively 0 risks to your life if you start a vegan diet, unless you're mentally retarded and start eating just grass everyday. We are no longer in the state of nature for things like slavery or meat eating where we have to worry another tribe will kill us all because they have more slavery or meat eatery than us.
No disagreements really with the text, but the tag-line should perhaps remove the word "dairy"; this is an argument against eating eggs, really. One can make a very good utilitarian case for avoiding milk, but it isn't obviously inconsistent to avoid meat and eggs but consume milk.
You are using the wrong units. Mass of food produced is not relevant, but rather nutritional content, and eggs are nutritionally very dense. Also, it's just nonsense to treat hours of captivity as the same for a fish and a pig; you need to adjust for sentience.
The linked chart does adjust for sentience.
Fair enough, you got me, but your numbers are messed up. There's no way .332 for a chicken and .515 for a pig is correct.
The numbers came from the most detailed report every carried out on animal sentience, done by Rethink Priorities. I value that a lot more than one's naive intuitions about these subjects.
Well, you'll get there in time. There are some good comments on the OP, but Anatoly Karlin has written a strong extended piece on this using multiple lines of evidence, he gives pigs a score 100 times that of a chicken https://akarlin.com/animals/
I've been an ovo-lacto-vegetarian for almost a decade. I only buy myself organic free-run/free-run eggs.
I've felt bad about not being a vegan that whole time. I felt even worse about it all before I was a vegetarian. I haven't become vegan for other reasons. I was afraid to read this post because I thought it would impel me to feel more horrible, though it probably wouldn't convince me to go vegan either.
I was thinking if I read this post that I might be convinced to start eating meat against to be morally consistent, even if that'd make me a worse person, as I might then at least feel like less of a hypocrite. That's why I put off reading it for days. I'm tired of feeling bad for not knowing how I should live in other ways on top of being vegan, so I could see myself resigning to this. I could at least be confident I'm getting more of enough of the right nutrients, and live my life trying to support animal welfare in other ways without being worried about my health.
I'm not ready to go vegan and I don't know if I'll ever be. This includes health reasons regarding my more personal health needs, such as nervous system issues and multiple neurological disabilities I don't understand well. I haven't figured them out yet.
This post wasn't that moving or convincing either way, in convincing me to go vegan, or to abandon vegetarianism so a vegan like yourself might respect me more even if you'd see me as a worse person. (I could still respect you, and your disrespect of me would be sort of welcome.) This post has me thinking I should stop eating eggs, and start eating beef again instead.
Questions:
1. Should I do that?
2. How much more of my own potential physical suffering am I possibly obliged to suffer through as a somewhat disabled person were I to go vegan, for the ethical sake of going vegan?
1. Depends on where you get the beef from. If the hens you're getting eggs from are living great lives, it's probably not wrong, and eating miserable cows would probably be much worse. But if you, say, sometimes eat eggs at restaurants, and given that organic eggs aren't very ethical (pasture raised are the ones that are a major improvement), switching to beef might be a good bet.
2. I think it's hard to know and there might not be a precise fact of the matter. I'm generally skeptical that being vegan is bad for health except in very rare cases, but it's possible that one of those cases appliels to you.
How do free-range eggs factor into this? If the chickens are genuinely free-range, I don't see a problem with consuming the eggs they naturally produce. The problem is hens being kept in battery cages, so eggs that don't involve that should be fine, right?
I think that we should also weigh intelligence in these calculations as well, since @Anatoly Karlin argues that creatures with more neurons are likely to suffer more and also to suffer in more complex ways than creatures with less neurons. Fish might be confined a lot in factory farms, but they're also much, much duller than pigs are.
Thoughts on cage-free / free range etc eggs?
See this site about the myth of humane eggs: https://www.humanemyth.org/cagefree.htm
Not much of a debunking. Killing domesticated animals so long as it is done quickly is not wrong.
That's certainly debatable. In any case, the "Humane Myth" site also has information about the cruelty that occurs in supposedly humane farming practices before the animals are killed.
I agree it’s debatable. I’ll check out the other info, but my experience with these websites is they are unreliable because they are maintained by motivated activists.
This is debatable; standard eggs are the worst animal product, but there are free range eggs and milk is the minimum impact source of animal protein. So yes, “vegetarianism” is not a sensible but welfare conscious omnivorism makes sense. As an individualist concept, but also as political activism.
I agree with you (Bentham's Bulldog) partly, but I'm troubled by your exclusive focus on suffering. The core issue (for me) is that animals are sentient beings with their own interests. Using them for human ends, regardless of how we treat those animals, denies them autonomy and reduces them to mere resources for our use.
If you're not familiar with the animal-rights philosophy of Gary Francione, I would encourage you to investigate it. When I encountered his work, I switched from being a welfarist to being an abolitionist vegan.
I think it's fine to treat people and animals as ends. With people you should be wary of doing it because you're probably engaging in myopic behavior that is net antisocial (will decrease your wellbeing in the long run), but animals can pretty much never contribute to the well being of humans besides being used as ends to their goals. Plausibly this would change if we could genetically engineer them to be much smarter, but before that I don't think animals deserve any social rights like a right to being respected or whatever.
You base your claims on only one method of raising food animals. Even if you include all of the other methods, your claim of eating meat being solely about pleasure is an appeal to emotion.
To the best of my knowledge, the vast majority (over 99%) of the land animals consumed in the United States originate from factory farms, which are essentially torture chambers for animals. Therefore, it is an indisputable fact that consuming animal products causes immense suffering and pain to animals, under normal circumstances. On the other hand, it is not unrealistic to acknowledge that we consume these products primarily for minor benefits such as gustatory pleasure. Given the availability of a well-planned vegan diet that is generally considered healthy, one may question the rationale behind our continued consumption of meat. Even if there are reasons beyond gustatory pleasure, they often involve obtaining relatively minor benefits for ourselves, especially in light of the significant suffering endured by animals.
it is unrealistic and constitutes as an appeal to emotion. Do better.
I would be grateful if you could provide specific examples of what you believe to be unrealistic or emotionally appealing in my critique of your previous statements. I see no reason to accept your response
Morality just is appeals to emotion. Purely rational beings with no emotional attachment to their own pleasure or existence wouldn't care about being tortured forever or being killed, but presumably most humans are not psychologically constituted like that.