Ye there is a whole industry producing these crazy effective numbers, the most concerning thing about utilitarians or just any sufficiently committed consequentialist, is that they have an obvious incentive to exaggerate, if they think donations are still net good and the costs to their reputation is low etc.
But the fact that basically one guy when he ran ACE exaggerated things doesn't tell us much about genuine behavior. And if EAs are really committed to effectiveness, they'll be concerned about exaggeration.
Factory farming exists because it’s the most economical way to produce cheap products and people preferably buy cheaper products if they can get by with it. Period.
It won’t stop unless it becomes illegal, forcefully shifting the economic burden to the consumer, or people stop buying it, voluntarily shifting the economic burden to the consumer.
The only solution for a person in this situation is to buy meat from someone producing it in a way that feels morally palatable and pay the extra cost. If you can’t afford ethically raised animal products or don’t have a source for them, you should be vegan.
Giving a charitable organization money to spread a bit of fire retardant while continuing to stoke the fire with the rest of your money is a terribly ineffective way of promoting change. I do suppose it’ll make you feel better about yourself… as long as you maintain a bit of cognitive dissonance.
All these "offsetting" donations (whether it's offsetting one's carbon emissions through donations like Bill Gates does or stuff like this) strike me as quite unconvincing.
It's like telling someone it's okay to take a dump on someone's bed as long as you pay for someone else to clean it up the stinking pile of sh*t afterwards.
Or that scene in a Tale of Two Cities, where one of the French Aristocrats strikes and kills a poor child with their horse carriage and then drops a gold coin (?) as compensation. One of the observers picks up the coin and hurls it back at the horse carriage.
You have got to go vegan. There is no two ways about it.
While this is a very reasonable advice, I want to add that not all animal protein imply the same suffering: runminants (cows and sheep) are often raised on pastures; additionally, given the enormous production of milky cows, milk and derivatives imply far less suffering by gram of protein than any other animal products. Quite counter intuitively, eggs are often worse than chicken meat.
Totally agree! FarmKind's compassion calculator (www.compassioncalculator) factors this in. For different foods it considers the number of animals impacted per serve, and the "suffering adjusted days" for each animal (which includes all three of their probability of sentience, their welfare range, and what life is like for them in intensive farming systems)
You kept repeating that animals are made worse of by your existence as a meat eater, what about the effect that the marginal human has on reducing wild animal suffering, factory farming itself seems like it would have a direct effect on encouraging habitat loss. If it really was the case that the marginal human is in expectation a net negative, doesn’t that have all sorts of weird implications for various human charities and population growth etc. IIRC ppl in a ACX thread were concerned that donating a kidney would increase animal suffering.
This blog is about the direct harm your meat consumption causes to farm animals once you already exist. While the indirect effects you mention (population dynamics, habitat changes, wild animal welfare) are interesting questions, they're separate from this specific point. My current view is that we're too uncertain about different wild animals' welfare and how changes in land use affect them to confidently factor those into our decisions.
This blog is about lots of different things, I know Matthew has for a long time been some flavour of utilitarian, and these issues are important from such a perspective, most obviously the direct effects of factory farming on habitat loss, but also the wider implications from a utilitarian (or even something like Huemer’s) perspective.
I think you are thinking about uncertainty wrong, as in just to be safe don’t do factory farming, whereas there seems to be so much uncertainty on the sign and magnitude of the effect, implying delaying action and doing more research. Obviously factory farming and population growth aren’t the most efficient ways to reduce wild animal suffering, but in terms of actual charities and the effects you can have on the margin, they are the most obvious. As in overfishing good and we need more cars to reduce insect populations or something.
I'm not saying "I'm uncertain so to be safe dont do factory farming". I'm saying that in terms of direct impact on animals, factory farming is clearly bad. Then on the indirect impact on wild animals, even though it may dwarf the expected value calculations if we had the answer, we are so clueless about the sign of the impact that the expected value we can currently assign is 0 +- a shitload. That means that until we make some headway on these wild animal questions (which I'm skeptical we will any time soon), the right working answer to use is "don't do factory farming".
Ye the direct effects of factory farming are only the most obvious ways a meat eater might respond, which is definitely a weaker argument. The stronger one would be to push the utilitarian into saying something like we need more effective ways to exterminate populations of animals, except the few net good ones, and even then we should trade off between rats on heroin and the cost to keep a human around.
Presumably most serious utilitarians think that the emergence of life itself is worse on net so far, compared to global warming or factory farming etc. that the only way it could be redeemed would be if our descendants evolve such to tile the universe with rats on heroin or happy brain ems etc. but seems like the obvious inference would be life was on net bad since its emergence, life is currently on net bad, and therefore life will continue to be net bad. I don’t think I believe in purely Darwinian evolution, but seems like if it were the case there are probably deep evolutionary reasons as to why creatures it creates have on net bad lives, and that moderns have basc no chance of standing up to Darwinian evolution considering Moderns can’t even reproduce themselves.
Obviously when discussing such a complex topic with lots of possible ways of increasing utils with all sorts of hard to predict secondary effects, and only a few effective actions on the margin eg. charities, the most effective decisions are pretty hard to determine. Nevertheless seems like humans could have a real positive effect by doing more overfishing and creating charities and policies that more effectively (and primarily aimed at) reducing wild animal populations. I was speaking to this guy https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Edwards-14 last year and he was complaining that whilst New Zealand’s cap and trade policy for fish increased populations it’s not even close to what it was in the past, obviously overfishing has been an extremely effective way of reducing wild animal suffering.
Omnivores may also consider shifting to independently certified higher welfare alternatives recognized by animal welfare non-profits such as the ASPCA, AWI, Farm Forward, CiWF, and FACT, though there are legitimate criticisms of humanewashing of lower tiers of some certifications: https://findhumane.com/quickfilter
Thanks for this article. If it persuades just a few people to adopt its message it’ll have done a good thing. I’d like to raise a question about its starting premise:
Shouldn’t someone just stop eating meat too?
You spend a fair bit of time detailing the empirical premise—that factory farming causes immense suffering. You then spend a fair bit of time detailing the additional empirical premise that your recommended course of action, donating to specific charities, will reduce this suffering. But you move very quickly through the more normatively charged premise that someone might just decide to continue eating meat despite knowing the empirical facts about the suffering it causes.
I’m wondering if we should spend more time on this claim. Specifically, if someone knows factory farming causes net suffering, and if someone knows the meat they’re eating is factory farmed and is unnecessary for his or her healthy sustenance, why on utilitarian grounds should it not be morally required that this person stop eating factory-farmed meat?
A few responses come to my mind, and I’d be interested to hear what you think of one of them.
One bites the bullet: this person ,,should,, stop eating factory-farmed meat because doing so is wrong. Your suggestion in this article makes up for common weakness of will, then, by offering an alternate route towards the same end of reducing animal suffering. If we can’t meet a higher bar, at least try to meet a lower one.
I find this response less than satisfying for two reasons. First, it is overemphasizes the difficulty of abstaining from eating animals. Second, the course of action it recommends isn’t optimific. Surely not eating meat ,,and,, making these donations is the morally superior action on utilitarian grounds.
If that’s right, then should we not press harder on the actual normative requirements of a utilitarian analysis of eating factory-farmed animals?
To be clear, a background concern motivates me here: a common objection to consequentialist moral theories is that in moral appraisal they divorce intentions and consequences. In doing so, they threaten to make moral praiseworthiness fungible: I don’t care too much about how and why you get to optimific, as long as you get there. Applied to this topic, this means that committed omnivores can ‘net-balance’ their way out of ethical herbivorism by ensuring that for everybody hog testicle and chicken heart they consume they make a donation to a relevant animal welfare charity. Broligarchs in Silicon Valley are now spit roasting live cats because, with each turn of the rod, they each donate a million dollars to a relevant charity.
Are they fulfilling what’s morally required of them? My sense is that they’re not, and that might be because moral appraisal should focus not just on consequences, but also motivations: to wit, here specifically the dispositions—some might say virtues—of the moral actor.
I’m not sure I’m right here. But something seems to me amiss about your argument; it seems to give too much wiggle room to those who choose not to do something easy and (for most) immediately accessible: stop eating animal products (and donate if you’re able, too).
I don't agree with "offsetting". Even if you are fully replacing the suffering, it seems like a bad principle to build your morality around. There's a couple reasons for this:
1. You can be more certain that you are not on net causing more suffering. If you just stop eating meat, you are not participating in this terrible system, and are not directly related to the harm caused to these animals. If you use "offsetting", you are directly related to the harm caused to these animals, and are actually supporting it, all while not being very certain whether the "offsetting" donation actually makes up for the related suffering.
2. Doing good does not replace the bad that you did or are doing. Imagine you took this exact same position regarding slavery. It's okay to have slaves, just make sure to also advocate for ending slavery or make donations to orgs that are trying to end slavery. Clearly this is wrong. And it seems that clearly eating factory farmed meat (especially chicken) is wrong, and should not be "offset".
There are other issues with offsetting. It's eerily similar to Raskolnikov's idea in Crime and Punishment. Or like Robin Hood. But who are you (people in general) to say that I can overstep ethical boundaries because I am also doing good?
If you hate factory farming but also can't handle a vegan diet (I tried for a long time and it ruined me in multiple ways—I actually took some time to recover) then the best option (if it is available to you) is ethically hunting wild game yourself: https://brandonmcmurtrie.substack.com/p/is-hunting-wrong.
Alright. I like your newsletter but I have to speak on behalf of the animals for this one. You proposed a naïve solution to a problem that already has a solution: Veganism. Even if the numbers are true (they're not), this "solution" STILL ignores the victims. Imagine yourself as one of these animals. How acceptable would you find it if someone told you "hey this guy is still going to r*pe and k!ll you for a sandwich but that's okay because he saved a dozen of your friends." Yeah, you wouldn't find it acceptable AT ALL. You would still exploited by your oppressor. Exploiting animals for unnecessary reasons is ALWAYS WRONG, even if you throw 10 trillion dollars at the issue. True Veganism is not utilitarian. I get that you want to do good, and you can do that by advocating for the victims from their perspective, not being a naïve oppressor apologist. Reconsider this post immediately.
In light of pessimism about wild animal welfare, and evidence that insects are sentient and that eating vegan tends to increase their population¹, if we’re anti-speciesist, choosing to eat meat over eating vegan seems more like deciding between creating (with no third option) a world where <N kids are farmed and exploited by aliens> and one where <10000N kids are left to die of starvation, predation or exposure in the wild>, rather than a “anti-exploitation” choice with no obvious moral trade-offs.
To me, the former world, while no doubt horrible in itself, seems at least preferable (=less bad) over the latter. So, eating meat—even though it involves exploiting animals—seems at least permissible. And this holds true whether or not I’m a utilitarian.
¹ many orders of magnitude more than it reduces farmed animal population.
Can't disagree more. You are being a little naive and credulous, IMO, about these organizations. Even if each of them is run by saints and trying their best to give accurate Information (something I doubt), the math just doesn't math. Anyone should be able to see this in 2 seconds.
According to you, these organizations are "pushing for legal and corporate reforms to get animals out of cages, supporting the development of alternative proteins, and doing research into how to make animal advocacy more effective".
So let's say I give $50. Did I save a single animal? No. Literally, no; no extra, 50-dollars-worth of "advocacy" got done; and if it did, it was not some magical $50 that just so happened to finally getting some policy over the top.
$5000? Still no, doesn't really move the needle on "advocacy" or "research".
$50k? Nope. $100k? Maybe now they can hire a secretary for one of the "researchers" to handle paper flow. Still no animals got saved. But feel free to feel good about yourself!
Bottom line, you simply cannot know what the number is that moves, say, McDonalds to get to the next level on their welfare commitments. And any organization implying otherwise is not being honest. This is also the problem with cancer and disease research and advocacy--nobody knows the denominator, so all the figures of what $X can do are just pure fiction.
And the math problem also affects the case for veganism: if you are vegan, and choose to bypass a hamburger on Tuesday, you did not just save 1/250th of a cow. The meat is already sliced and in the stores; your consumption is not even a rounding error. If you didn't eat a pound of beef, the pound didn't get put back on the cow; it got marked down and eventually tossed. It is unlikely any vegan has ever saved many animals, due to the scale of the agriculture and grocery industries.
I think the best bet, outside of doing personal advocacy instead of paying someone else to (write your legislators! write your fave fast food joint! or your fave mom-and-pop restaurant!) is to shop ethically.
Whole Foods is the leader here, by a mile it seems. All their meat is humanely raised and suppliers independently graded. My wife and I will only buy non-beef meat from WFs or a farmers' market.
In doing this, you stay "inside the tent". Think of politics--if you get pissed at, say, the Republican party moving right, and you change your registration and go to the other side, you have even LESS control over the drift, and have made it more likely that due to you (and others like you) leaving the "tent", the party will continue to get more and more extreme. This has obviously been a driver of the extremism of both parties, as more and more voters register Independent...and effectively remove themselves from the conversation.
Same with veganism. A vegan has 0 influence on the Ag business. But I and other people choosing free range eggs, for example, do; and the fact that you now see "free range" and "cage-free" in literally every supermarket is a testament, yes, to the advocacy groups; but more so to the power of the wallet--consumers getting educated and paying the premium for better treatment.
It's a paradox--stop eating meat-->remove yourself from the market-->you cease to be a customer whose money is available to win.
So if you care about this issue (and you really do!), do your own advocacy, and eat (humanely raised) meat.
TBH I'm not gonna read all that. I glanced at the abstract, and it comes across as motivated reasoning. Which makes sense--this space (veganism/meat) is wholly laden with fraud, for the simple utilitarian reason that everyone is at max emotional commitment to the issue. What's a little lie to save a life?
Many years ago I had to de-program the woman who became my wife. She was vegan; I was agnostic to the area. But she had volumes and volumes of books, and I, as pretty smart dude and trained skeptic, read all her literature, and every bit of it was a lie, falling apart under just basic logic and some limited scientific training. The "China study", the "dangers" of casein; these groups even funded well-known and assumed-expert groups, like PCRM, who get quoted in legacy media to this day, which are top-to-bottom purveyors of fraud.
It's a lot like crisis pregnancy centers. Heard of these? These are supposed Christians, who fake being abortion clinics, then lie and misrepresent the current state of medicine and science in order to talk women out of abortion. Makes sense--what's a little lie to save a person's LIFE?? And while I am pro-choice, I am also Christian, and we do not get a pass to lie as a means-to-ends thing (unlike Muslims).
On that note, even as an animal lover, I would commend to Bentham that there is a pretty good chance that all of the information you have ingested on things like animal pain and sentience is hopelessly corrupted. To be clear--I do not KNOW that to be the case. But based on my pass through this space as I noted above, I presume everything, every "fact" on either side of the animal welfare debate, to be slanted at best; twisted and hyperbolic on average; and outright fabrication at worst.
Want to help animals? Actually save a life, and KNOW for a fact that you did? Adopt a dog or cat. Or foster. Or give money to one of the local rescues so they can take in one more.
When farm animal groups buy land and actually start using their money to buy back some animals, then I might give them some of my cash. But "advocacy"?...seriously dudes, c'mon. Everyone in this comment section is smarter than this.
My initial argument from basic math stands, it doesn't get refuted by some long philosophical tract. Show me how $5 saves an animal--work it through in the basic legal sense of "but for", which is more generous than "cause/effect" but is the minimum demand to show efficacy.
On the expected value argument, which also relies on basic math (whether for consumption or donations): you can yourself look at, e.g., successful cage-free campaigns and see how much was spent on them. Removing $1 from the campaigning org would (very very likely) not have changed the outcome of any campaign, but removing all the dollars one at a time would have changed the outcome of every campaign, so there must, as a matter of logic, be certain (otherwise apparently arbitrary) thresholds where a small donation is difference-making. While any donation is unlikely to make the difference, it will make a huge difference if it does make a difference, so that washes out. Parallel reasoning is the only way your own point about humanely-raised meat can make any sense at all, since of course any given act of buying from Whole Foods or whatever is also very unlikely to make a difference to overall production.
There is plenty of motivated reasoning from everybody in the debate. Obviously you have an extremely strong agenda yourself. Nothing to do except try to consider arguments on the merits.
There are farm sanctuaries that buy land and care for animals, though they are not the most cost-effective option in expectation. Of course they do not get their animals just by buying them from farms, for reasons you can figure out if you think about it.
"Obviously you have an extremely strong agenda yourself"
Was with you, Dustin (not agreeing, but seeing your point) until you tried that. Look, I have far from an agenda. Instead, as a reader of this blog, I have been presented numerous arguments just like today's, and have not spoken up, chalking it up to youthful enthusiasm in service of a great goal (I actually love animals and as stated, go out of my way as you do for their welfare, even though we differ on the "right" method to pursue).
I spoke up today, not out of agendas but actually having some free time to speak on sloppy assumptions and wanted to contribute to clearer thinking in the comments (frighteningly smart group of people).
My takedown of a bad argument does not make me the one with an "agenda". The first step to regaining your footing and thinking clearly is facing the fact that you clearly do, and (if you are so inclined) trying to persuade others while in full acknowledgment of your own shortcomings.
Look up "motte and bailey" (JK, I know you know what that is). This is what your response amounts to. And I won't engage with it lest you move the goalposts again.
Let me try another route, make it simpler, so you can see the error. Here is the very rough argument you have come here to defend:
"Hey guys, give $X to Y, if you do so you will actually save animals, even for this little contribution". Patently false. Sorry, I like Bentham, but it just is. No one needs to read philosophy or use big words on this one.
Instead, you are trying to swap that argument with this one:
"Hey guys, if we all give some $X amount of money, at some theoretical point that amount will make a difference, so let's band together and try!" Possibly true. But again, not the argument, and not an answer to mine.
And the point comparing free market transactions, where data is literally aggregated with every purchase and every purchase can be a tipping point; with nebulous "advocacy" orgs, fails, and I think you know that. 500000 people buying cage-free eggs makes a market (as does 10k, or 2 million, etc). Companies selling both caged and cage-free can literally respond to the data by moving X animals from one type of confinement to another. Or, another seller can enter the market, and outcompete Tyson et al.
By comparison, you have no idea how much "advocacy" bought could save even one animal.
You are correct, there are farm animal sanctuaries. If you would rather put money there than toward domestic animal welfare which I prefer for the same emotional reasons you prefer to give to something else (there, my agenda/bias, acknowledged), do so. I think it is transparently better than "advocacy" organizations.
And you are 100% right, this giving fails if said sanctuaries bought the animals. I regret the error.
To be clear, I am not a vegan, and agree there is a case for humane animal products under certain circumstances. I just think your reasoning is bad.
The suggested amendment would be that instead of saying:
"For less than a dollar a day, you can make sure that every kind of animal is better off because of your existence"
OP should have said:
"For less than a dollar a day, you can make sure that every kind of animal is better off in expectation because of your existence."
It is true that that's what OP should have said, but it doesn't affect the argument.
Now, you want to say that the amended claim is false, or at least unproven, because we have no idea how effective advocacy is. My claim is that we can examine ongoing campaigns and see what sort of effects they are having for what cost, and determine how effective advocacy donations are in expectation in that way. Your response, as far as I can tell, is just that you refuse to do the examination.
You argue that veganism is pointless, since "your consumption is not even a rounding error." But of course, if so, your consumption of anything is not even a rounding error. If price mechanisms are sensitive enough to shift production on the basis of a single consumer buying cage-free rather than caged eggs, one imagines they are also sensitive enough to shift production on the basis of a single consumer buying plant products instead of animal products. There is just no plausible model where "A vegan has 0 influence on the Ag business. But I and other people choosing free range eggs, for example, do." (Of course, what I actually think, again, is that you are not likely to make an impact either way, but this washes out for expected utility reasons.)
To be clear, I would not rather, or rather anyone else, put money towards farm animal sanctuaries. If you mean what you say, however, perhaps you should, since you just said that you might, if they existed, which they do.
As for whether you have an agenda: you are giving, I think, pretty clearly bad, inconsistent arguments that support your lifestyle and explicitly refusing to consider objections while griping about needing to deprogram your wife, etc. I think this is as good as the evidence you have provided of others having an agenda.
Nice post! If you have the time and inclination, it would be helpful to write about continuing to eat animal products while giving to FarmKind, but sourcing your animal products from operations that are AWA-certified or better. By “better,” I mean farms that you have personally observed, researched, or spoken to the owners of yourself. Being vegan, while less convenient than default omnivorism, is nonetheless an easier default action if you’re an animal welfarist, but it is not the only way to abstain from supporting factory farms. You can remain an omnivore while getting your animal products from carefully vetted sources. These sources, while perhaps not pure under certain vegan ethical standards (such as animal rights or anti-exploitation), at least represent a major improvement in UTILITY compared to factory farms.
Additionally, there are tangible benefits to this approach, such as sending price signals into the economy that express demand for animal products sourced in an especially ethical way. This impact is unique and cannot be exactly replicated by initiatives like FarmKind (as far as I know). Though certainly, FarmKind is good to donate to, no matter what diet you follow.
Good point about market signals! Choosing more humane products is better than not doing so. However, you could arguably help even more animals by donating the price difference to super-effective charities. The charities FarmKind supports actually create similar market pressure, but at a much larger scale - for example, when The Humane League gets major companies to commit to cage-free eggs, they shift the purchasing of millions of customers at once.
Yes, I accept that that’s the case. In fact, buying ethically sourced animal products alone may be the least “effective” welfare intervention when stacked against simply being vegan or offsetting total omnivorism with effective animal charities, which are outrageously effective since animal welfare improvement is pathetically low-hanging fruit in altruism at the moment.
However, for ethical omnivores, becoming curious about the source of your food can be encouraging, making you feel like you’ve stepped into an alternative world of food that is intact already, ready to welcome you. And the network effects therein probably have their own behavioral gravitation, making it easier to stay the course and not be some lone “moral ranger” making decisions that literally no one else around you understands. Plus, it’s so rare to find operations that optimize for animal welfare (over other things like “organic,” “regenerative,” “sustainably raised,” etc.) that when you DO find one, AWA or not, you feel a desire to shower it with rewards and lock down your source for the next season!
Eating anything and then offsetting cheaply is, perhaps, the best “compromise” approach there is. Better than being strictly vegan, which is both difficult for most people to sustain in the current food system and perhaps overall less effective than offsetting a “cruel” diet; better than being flexitarian or reducetarian, which are unprincipled; and obviously much better than “eating anything” full stop.
But I’d argue that the best position for omnivores is the one where you give to effective charities AND source your animal products properly. It’s not the path of least resistance, but it’s not nearly as hard as strict veganism. You immediately enter into a market and social network that is actually pretty large compared to the ones that cater specifically to vegans. There are plenty of people in this market who will find your preferences intelligible and excitedly share what information they have (ethical farmers are proud of what they are and don’t tend to hide it). And, most importantly, you send market signals to the RIGHT places, and don’t risk pushing factory-farmed product inventories over their production thresholds with your (iterated) purchases, thus causing many new animals to be bred in factory farm conditions. Avoiding doing THAT is no small win for welfare.
“Properly sourced” animal products are significantly more expensive than the commonly available stuff. If our goal is to maximize expected utility, then <buying the cheapest available animal products + donating the extra money you’d have spent on the higher welfare stuff to the Shrimp Welfare Project or something similar> seems better than simply <buying the higher welfare stuff>.
Yes, and I stated above that buying factory-farmed products and offsetting is the best compromise position for expected utility. But of course, it’s not the single best behavior for expected utility, and if we really take that concept seriously, it pushes us into some weird corners of behavior space that are technically optimal but realistically psychologically unsustainable for most normal people.
I have recently transitioned into this “conscientious omnivorism” diet, and I was initially concerned about the cost differences, but they’ve been surprisingly marginal (so far!). Some welfare-certified products cost marginally more, some cost the same, and some actually cost less than their factory-farmed equivalents. One could argue for buying the literal cheapest options there are, sacrificing ingredient quality so they can offset with larger sums. But most people won’t think that way. They’ll land on a middle ground—buying food that’s only marginally (or not even) cheaper than humane options, and then offsetting. From the outside, this looks strange when they’re already so close to choosing humane products outright.
It remains an open question whether macrofarming can be reformed to such an extent that most consequentialist animal welfarists would be satisfied, or whether divestment will eventually become necessary. If factory farms are simply an environment that is suboptimal for animal welfare despite tinkering and marginal improvements via interventions by the charities that FarmKind works with, then, to be consistent, eventually we may just have to bite the bullet and become vegetarians, vegans, or conscientious omnivores. (That, or some other kind of market solution could swoop in to save the day—like actually delicious cultivated meat at scale.)
Ultimately, what I care about is how sustainable actions are. If someone can’t handle the marginal price increase of humane animal products or the research effort it takes to find reliable options AND afford donations to effective charities, then, at the very least, they should just give to charities and offset. But if they can do both, all the better. And if they can maintain veganism while giving to charities, better still. And if they can, in the limit, devote themselves to animal advocacy—working full-time for a high-impact organization, running local campaigns to shift consumer behavior, even funding new alternatives in the technology space—then wow, incredible gains in expected utility! But, you know, a very select few are ever going to do anything like that.
You might be interested in https://medium.com/@harrisonnathan/the-actual-number-is-almost-surely-higher-92c908f36517. I remember Scott Alexander read this and found it credible, so I have not trusted these extremely low numbers since. $23/month just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
My sense is that while ACE's earlier reports were hugely flawed but that they've gotten much better after taking into account the views of genuine experts https://animalcharityevaluators.org/blog/updates-to-2024-charity-evaluation-criteria/
But that was about a kind of charity that ace no longer supports.
Ye there is a whole industry producing these crazy effective numbers, the most concerning thing about utilitarians or just any sufficiently committed consequentialist, is that they have an obvious incentive to exaggerate, if they think donations are still net good and the costs to their reputation is low etc.
But the fact that basically one guy when he ran ACE exaggerated things doesn't tell us much about genuine behavior. And if EAs are really committed to effectiveness, they'll be concerned about exaggeration.
Yeah, see mistake #9: https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/mistakes?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=2mrqee
Factory farming exists because it’s the most economical way to produce cheap products and people preferably buy cheaper products if they can get by with it. Period.
It won’t stop unless it becomes illegal, forcefully shifting the economic burden to the consumer, or people stop buying it, voluntarily shifting the economic burden to the consumer.
The only solution for a person in this situation is to buy meat from someone producing it in a way that feels morally palatable and pay the extra cost. If you can’t afford ethically raised animal products or don’t have a source for them, you should be vegan.
Giving a charitable organization money to spread a bit of fire retardant while continuing to stoke the fire with the rest of your money is a terribly ineffective way of promoting change. I do suppose it’ll make you feel better about yourself… as long as you maintain a bit of cognitive dissonance.
All these "offsetting" donations (whether it's offsetting one's carbon emissions through donations like Bill Gates does or stuff like this) strike me as quite unconvincing.
It's like telling someone it's okay to take a dump on someone's bed as long as you pay for someone else to clean it up the stinking pile of sh*t afterwards.
Or that scene in a Tale of Two Cities, where one of the French Aristocrats strikes and kills a poor child with their horse carriage and then drops a gold coin (?) as compensation. One of the observers picks up the coin and hurls it back at the horse carriage.
You have got to go vegan. There is no two ways about it.
While this is a very reasonable advice, I want to add that not all animal protein imply the same suffering: runminants (cows and sheep) are often raised on pastures; additionally, given the enormous production of milky cows, milk and derivatives imply far less suffering by gram of protein than any other animal products. Quite counter intuitively, eggs are often worse than chicken meat.
Totally agree! FarmKind's compassion calculator (www.compassioncalculator) factors this in. For different foods it considers the number of animals impacted per serve, and the "suffering adjusted days" for each animal (which includes all three of their probability of sentience, their welfare range, and what life is like for them in intensive farming systems)
They don't even include sheep for this reason I think.
Thanks! I bought a monthly offset today after reading this article.
Reading this post felt like Ralphie with his Little Orphan Annie decoder pin.
“A crummy commercial? Son of a bitch!”
You kept repeating that animals are made worse of by your existence as a meat eater, what about the effect that the marginal human has on reducing wild animal suffering, factory farming itself seems like it would have a direct effect on encouraging habitat loss. If it really was the case that the marginal human is in expectation a net negative, doesn’t that have all sorts of weird implications for various human charities and population growth etc. IIRC ppl in a ACX thread were concerned that donating a kidney would increase animal suffering.
This blog is about the direct harm your meat consumption causes to farm animals once you already exist. While the indirect effects you mention (population dynamics, habitat changes, wild animal welfare) are interesting questions, they're separate from this specific point. My current view is that we're too uncertain about different wild animals' welfare and how changes in land use affect them to confidently factor those into our decisions.
This blog is about lots of different things, I know Matthew has for a long time been some flavour of utilitarian, and these issues are important from such a perspective, most obviously the direct effects of factory farming on habitat loss, but also the wider implications from a utilitarian (or even something like Huemer’s) perspective.
I think you are thinking about uncertainty wrong, as in just to be safe don’t do factory farming, whereas there seems to be so much uncertainty on the sign and magnitude of the effect, implying delaying action and doing more research. Obviously factory farming and population growth aren’t the most efficient ways to reduce wild animal suffering, but in terms of actual charities and the effects you can have on the margin, they are the most obvious. As in overfishing good and we need more cars to reduce insect populations or something.
I'm not saying "I'm uncertain so to be safe dont do factory farming". I'm saying that in terms of direct impact on animals, factory farming is clearly bad. Then on the indirect impact on wild animals, even though it may dwarf the expected value calculations if we had the answer, we are so clueless about the sign of the impact that the expected value we can currently assign is 0 +- a shitload. That means that until we make some headway on these wild animal questions (which I'm skeptical we will any time soon), the right working answer to use is "don't do factory farming".
Ye the direct effects of factory farming are only the most obvious ways a meat eater might respond, which is definitely a weaker argument. The stronger one would be to push the utilitarian into saying something like we need more effective ways to exterminate populations of animals, except the few net good ones, and even then we should trade off between rats on heroin and the cost to keep a human around.
I was talking about impacts on humans. But I no longer think it's obvious what impact humans have on wild animal suffering https://statesofexception.substack.com/p/climate-change-is-worse-than-factory
Presumably most serious utilitarians think that the emergence of life itself is worse on net so far, compared to global warming or factory farming etc. that the only way it could be redeemed would be if our descendants evolve such to tile the universe with rats on heroin or happy brain ems etc. but seems like the obvious inference would be life was on net bad since its emergence, life is currently on net bad, and therefore life will continue to be net bad. I don’t think I believe in purely Darwinian evolution, but seems like if it were the case there are probably deep evolutionary reasons as to why creatures it creates have on net bad lives, and that moderns have basc no chance of standing up to Darwinian evolution considering Moderns can’t even reproduce themselves.
Obviously when discussing such a complex topic with lots of possible ways of increasing utils with all sorts of hard to predict secondary effects, and only a few effective actions on the margin eg. charities, the most effective decisions are pretty hard to determine. Nevertheless seems like humans could have a real positive effect by doing more overfishing and creating charities and policies that more effectively (and primarily aimed at) reducing wild animal populations. I was speaking to this guy https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Charles-Edwards-14 last year and he was complaining that whilst New Zealand’s cap and trade policy for fish increased populations it’s not even close to what it was in the past, obviously overfishing has been an extremely effective way of reducing wild animal suffering.
Thank you for this information.
Omnivores may also consider shifting to independently certified higher welfare alternatives recognized by animal welfare non-profits such as the ASPCA, AWI, Farm Forward, CiWF, and FACT, though there are legitimate criticisms of humanewashing of lower tiers of some certifications: https://findhumane.com/quickfilter
Thanks for this article. If it persuades just a few people to adopt its message it’ll have done a good thing. I’d like to raise a question about its starting premise:
Shouldn’t someone just stop eating meat too?
You spend a fair bit of time detailing the empirical premise—that factory farming causes immense suffering. You then spend a fair bit of time detailing the additional empirical premise that your recommended course of action, donating to specific charities, will reduce this suffering. But you move very quickly through the more normatively charged premise that someone might just decide to continue eating meat despite knowing the empirical facts about the suffering it causes.
I’m wondering if we should spend more time on this claim. Specifically, if someone knows factory farming causes net suffering, and if someone knows the meat they’re eating is factory farmed and is unnecessary for his or her healthy sustenance, why on utilitarian grounds should it not be morally required that this person stop eating factory-farmed meat?
A few responses come to my mind, and I’d be interested to hear what you think of one of them.
One bites the bullet: this person ,,should,, stop eating factory-farmed meat because doing so is wrong. Your suggestion in this article makes up for common weakness of will, then, by offering an alternate route towards the same end of reducing animal suffering. If we can’t meet a higher bar, at least try to meet a lower one.
I find this response less than satisfying for two reasons. First, it is overemphasizes the difficulty of abstaining from eating animals. Second, the course of action it recommends isn’t optimific. Surely not eating meat ,,and,, making these donations is the morally superior action on utilitarian grounds.
If that’s right, then should we not press harder on the actual normative requirements of a utilitarian analysis of eating factory-farmed animals?
To be clear, a background concern motivates me here: a common objection to consequentialist moral theories is that in moral appraisal they divorce intentions and consequences. In doing so, they threaten to make moral praiseworthiness fungible: I don’t care too much about how and why you get to optimific, as long as you get there. Applied to this topic, this means that committed omnivores can ‘net-balance’ their way out of ethical herbivorism by ensuring that for everybody hog testicle and chicken heart they consume they make a donation to a relevant animal welfare charity. Broligarchs in Silicon Valley are now spit roasting live cats because, with each turn of the rod, they each donate a million dollars to a relevant charity.
Are they fulfilling what’s morally required of them? My sense is that they’re not, and that might be because moral appraisal should focus not just on consequences, but also motivations: to wit, here specifically the dispositions—some might say virtues—of the moral actor.
I’m not sure I’m right here. But something seems to me amiss about your argument; it seems to give too much wiggle room to those who choose not to do something easy and (for most) immediately accessible: stop eating animal products (and donate if you’re able, too).
I don't agree with "offsetting". Even if you are fully replacing the suffering, it seems like a bad principle to build your morality around. There's a couple reasons for this:
1. You can be more certain that you are not on net causing more suffering. If you just stop eating meat, you are not participating in this terrible system, and are not directly related to the harm caused to these animals. If you use "offsetting", you are directly related to the harm caused to these animals, and are actually supporting it, all while not being very certain whether the "offsetting" donation actually makes up for the related suffering.
2. Doing good does not replace the bad that you did or are doing. Imagine you took this exact same position regarding slavery. It's okay to have slaves, just make sure to also advocate for ending slavery or make donations to orgs that are trying to end slavery. Clearly this is wrong. And it seems that clearly eating factory farmed meat (especially chicken) is wrong, and should not be "offset".
There are other issues with offsetting. It's eerily similar to Raskolnikov's idea in Crime and Punishment. Or like Robin Hood. But who are you (people in general) to say that I can overstep ethical boundaries because I am also doing good?
If you hate factory farming but also can't handle a vegan diet (I tried for a long time and it ruined me in multiple ways—I actually took some time to recover) then the best option (if it is available to you) is ethically hunting wild game yourself: https://brandonmcmurtrie.substack.com/p/is-hunting-wrong.
It is not only an ethical way to minimize suffering while consuming meat (https://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/ev181_cahoone.pdf), it also combats our alienation from the natural world (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258208019_How_Hunting_Strengtens_Social_awareness_of_coupled_Human-natural_Systems, and: https://stud.epsilon.slu.se/8945/1/tickle_l_160405.pdf, and: https://journal-tes.ruc.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/p.22-Tickle-TES-171.pdf).
It places you back into the evolutionary niche in which we evolved, and for many of us hunters it comes with a number of psychological benefits (https://brandonmcmurtrie.substack.com/p/phenomenology-of-hunting-a-cure-for)
> (I tried for a long time and it ruined me in multiple ways—I actually took some time to recover)
What does this mean? Plant-based diets are widely recognised as perfectly healthy for adults.
Two most common explanations:
(1) He wasn't taking B12 supplements or B12 fortified foods.
(2) The fiber intake proved too much for his gut - in which case the advice is to slowly increase the fiber intake.
A less common cause could be something like gluten-sensitivity - his gluten intake may have gone up when he switched to a vegan diet.
I'd be curious to know.
Regardless, a plant based diet is likely to be the healthiest diet for most people with the caveat they take B12.
Great in theory but $23 to a charity seems suspect in several ways
Alright. I like your newsletter but I have to speak on behalf of the animals for this one. You proposed a naïve solution to a problem that already has a solution: Veganism. Even if the numbers are true (they're not), this "solution" STILL ignores the victims. Imagine yourself as one of these animals. How acceptable would you find it if someone told you "hey this guy is still going to r*pe and k!ll you for a sandwich but that's okay because he saved a dozen of your friends." Yeah, you wouldn't find it acceptable AT ALL. You would still exploited by your oppressor. Exploiting animals for unnecessary reasons is ALWAYS WRONG, even if you throw 10 trillion dollars at the issue. True Veganism is not utilitarian. I get that you want to do good, and you can do that by advocating for the victims from their perspective, not being a naïve oppressor apologist. Reconsider this post immediately.
This is the leftist argument against voting except applied to minimizing animal sufferring it, I love it
In light of pessimism about wild animal welfare, and evidence that insects are sentient and that eating vegan tends to increase their population¹, if we’re anti-speciesist, choosing to eat meat over eating vegan seems more like deciding between creating (with no third option) a world where <N kids are farmed and exploited by aliens> and one where <10000N kids are left to die of starvation, predation or exposure in the wild>, rather than a “anti-exploitation” choice with no obvious moral trade-offs.
To me, the former world, while no doubt horrible in itself, seems at least preferable (=less bad) over the latter. So, eating meat—even though it involves exploiting animals—seems at least permissible. And this holds true whether or not I’m a utilitarian.
¹ many orders of magnitude more than it reduces farmed animal population.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-04644-x
Do you hear yourself?
Can't disagree more. You are being a little naive and credulous, IMO, about these organizations. Even if each of them is run by saints and trying their best to give accurate Information (something I doubt), the math just doesn't math. Anyone should be able to see this in 2 seconds.
According to you, these organizations are "pushing for legal and corporate reforms to get animals out of cages, supporting the development of alternative proteins, and doing research into how to make animal advocacy more effective".
So let's say I give $50. Did I save a single animal? No. Literally, no; no extra, 50-dollars-worth of "advocacy" got done; and if it did, it was not some magical $50 that just so happened to finally getting some policy over the top.
$5000? Still no, doesn't really move the needle on "advocacy" or "research".
$50k? Nope. $100k? Maybe now they can hire a secretary for one of the "researchers" to handle paper flow. Still no animals got saved. But feel free to feel good about yourself!
Bottom line, you simply cannot know what the number is that moves, say, McDonalds to get to the next level on their welfare commitments. And any organization implying otherwise is not being honest. This is also the problem with cancer and disease research and advocacy--nobody knows the denominator, so all the figures of what $X can do are just pure fiction.
And the math problem also affects the case for veganism: if you are vegan, and choose to bypass a hamburger on Tuesday, you did not just save 1/250th of a cow. The meat is already sliced and in the stores; your consumption is not even a rounding error. If you didn't eat a pound of beef, the pound didn't get put back on the cow; it got marked down and eventually tossed. It is unlikely any vegan has ever saved many animals, due to the scale of the agriculture and grocery industries.
I think the best bet, outside of doing personal advocacy instead of paying someone else to (write your legislators! write your fave fast food joint! or your fave mom-and-pop restaurant!) is to shop ethically.
Whole Foods is the leader here, by a mile it seems. All their meat is humanely raised and suppliers independently graded. My wife and I will only buy non-beef meat from WFs or a farmers' market.
In doing this, you stay "inside the tent". Think of politics--if you get pissed at, say, the Republican party moving right, and you change your registration and go to the other side, you have even LESS control over the drift, and have made it more likely that due to you (and others like you) leaving the "tent", the party will continue to get more and more extreme. This has obviously been a driver of the extremism of both parties, as more and more voters register Independent...and effectively remove themselves from the conversation.
Same with veganism. A vegan has 0 influence on the Ag business. But I and other people choosing free range eggs, for example, do; and the fact that you now see "free range" and "cage-free" in literally every supermarket is a testament, yes, to the advocacy groups; but more so to the power of the wallet--consumers getting educated and paying the premium for better treatment.
It's a paradox--stop eating meat-->remove yourself from the market-->you cease to be a customer whose money is available to win.
So if you care about this issue (and you really do!), do your own advocacy, and eat (humanely raised) meat.
What do you think about the expected value response to this concern?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41055-018-00030-4
https://www.stafforini.com/library/kagan-2011.pdf
TBH I'm not gonna read all that. I glanced at the abstract, and it comes across as motivated reasoning. Which makes sense--this space (veganism/meat) is wholly laden with fraud, for the simple utilitarian reason that everyone is at max emotional commitment to the issue. What's a little lie to save a life?
Many years ago I had to de-program the woman who became my wife. She was vegan; I was agnostic to the area. But she had volumes and volumes of books, and I, as pretty smart dude and trained skeptic, read all her literature, and every bit of it was a lie, falling apart under just basic logic and some limited scientific training. The "China study", the "dangers" of casein; these groups even funded well-known and assumed-expert groups, like PCRM, who get quoted in legacy media to this day, which are top-to-bottom purveyors of fraud.
It's a lot like crisis pregnancy centers. Heard of these? These are supposed Christians, who fake being abortion clinics, then lie and misrepresent the current state of medicine and science in order to talk women out of abortion. Makes sense--what's a little lie to save a person's LIFE?? And while I am pro-choice, I am also Christian, and we do not get a pass to lie as a means-to-ends thing (unlike Muslims).
On that note, even as an animal lover, I would commend to Bentham that there is a pretty good chance that all of the information you have ingested on things like animal pain and sentience is hopelessly corrupted. To be clear--I do not KNOW that to be the case. But based on my pass through this space as I noted above, I presume everything, every "fact" on either side of the animal welfare debate, to be slanted at best; twisted and hyperbolic on average; and outright fabrication at worst.
Want to help animals? Actually save a life, and KNOW for a fact that you did? Adopt a dog or cat. Or foster. Or give money to one of the local rescues so they can take in one more.
When farm animal groups buy land and actually start using their money to buy back some animals, then I might give them some of my cash. But "advocacy"?...seriously dudes, c'mon. Everyone in this comment section is smarter than this.
My initial argument from basic math stands, it doesn't get refuted by some long philosophical tract. Show me how $5 saves an animal--work it through in the basic legal sense of "but for", which is more generous than "cause/effect" but is the minimum demand to show efficacy.
On the expected value argument, which also relies on basic math (whether for consumption or donations): you can yourself look at, e.g., successful cage-free campaigns and see how much was spent on them. Removing $1 from the campaigning org would (very very likely) not have changed the outcome of any campaign, but removing all the dollars one at a time would have changed the outcome of every campaign, so there must, as a matter of logic, be certain (otherwise apparently arbitrary) thresholds where a small donation is difference-making. While any donation is unlikely to make the difference, it will make a huge difference if it does make a difference, so that washes out. Parallel reasoning is the only way your own point about humanely-raised meat can make any sense at all, since of course any given act of buying from Whole Foods or whatever is also very unlikely to make a difference to overall production.
There is plenty of motivated reasoning from everybody in the debate. Obviously you have an extremely strong agenda yourself. Nothing to do except try to consider arguments on the merits.
There are farm sanctuaries that buy land and care for animals, though they are not the most cost-effective option in expectation. Of course they do not get their animals just by buying them from farms, for reasons you can figure out if you think about it.
"Obviously you have an extremely strong agenda yourself"
Was with you, Dustin (not agreeing, but seeing your point) until you tried that. Look, I have far from an agenda. Instead, as a reader of this blog, I have been presented numerous arguments just like today's, and have not spoken up, chalking it up to youthful enthusiasm in service of a great goal (I actually love animals and as stated, go out of my way as you do for their welfare, even though we differ on the "right" method to pursue).
I spoke up today, not out of agendas but actually having some free time to speak on sloppy assumptions and wanted to contribute to clearer thinking in the comments (frighteningly smart group of people).
My takedown of a bad argument does not make me the one with an "agenda". The first step to regaining your footing and thinking clearly is facing the fact that you clearly do, and (if you are so inclined) trying to persuade others while in full acknowledgment of your own shortcomings.
Look up "motte and bailey" (JK, I know you know what that is). This is what your response amounts to. And I won't engage with it lest you move the goalposts again.
Let me try another route, make it simpler, so you can see the error. Here is the very rough argument you have come here to defend:
"Hey guys, give $X to Y, if you do so you will actually save animals, even for this little contribution". Patently false. Sorry, I like Bentham, but it just is. No one needs to read philosophy or use big words on this one.
Instead, you are trying to swap that argument with this one:
"Hey guys, if we all give some $X amount of money, at some theoretical point that amount will make a difference, so let's band together and try!" Possibly true. But again, not the argument, and not an answer to mine.
And the point comparing free market transactions, where data is literally aggregated with every purchase and every purchase can be a tipping point; with nebulous "advocacy" orgs, fails, and I think you know that. 500000 people buying cage-free eggs makes a market (as does 10k, or 2 million, etc). Companies selling both caged and cage-free can literally respond to the data by moving X animals from one type of confinement to another. Or, another seller can enter the market, and outcompete Tyson et al.
By comparison, you have no idea how much "advocacy" bought could save even one animal.
You are correct, there are farm animal sanctuaries. If you would rather put money there than toward domestic animal welfare which I prefer for the same emotional reasons you prefer to give to something else (there, my agenda/bias, acknowledged), do so. I think it is transparently better than "advocacy" organizations.
And you are 100% right, this giving fails if said sanctuaries bought the animals. I regret the error.
To be clear, I am not a vegan, and agree there is a case for humane animal products under certain circumstances. I just think your reasoning is bad.
The suggested amendment would be that instead of saying:
"For less than a dollar a day, you can make sure that every kind of animal is better off because of your existence"
OP should have said:
"For less than a dollar a day, you can make sure that every kind of animal is better off in expectation because of your existence."
It is true that that's what OP should have said, but it doesn't affect the argument.
Now, you want to say that the amended claim is false, or at least unproven, because we have no idea how effective advocacy is. My claim is that we can examine ongoing campaigns and see what sort of effects they are having for what cost, and determine how effective advocacy donations are in expectation in that way. Your response, as far as I can tell, is just that you refuse to do the examination.
You argue that veganism is pointless, since "your consumption is not even a rounding error." But of course, if so, your consumption of anything is not even a rounding error. If price mechanisms are sensitive enough to shift production on the basis of a single consumer buying cage-free rather than caged eggs, one imagines they are also sensitive enough to shift production on the basis of a single consumer buying plant products instead of animal products. There is just no plausible model where "A vegan has 0 influence on the Ag business. But I and other people choosing free range eggs, for example, do." (Of course, what I actually think, again, is that you are not likely to make an impact either way, but this washes out for expected utility reasons.)
To be clear, I would not rather, or rather anyone else, put money towards farm animal sanctuaries. If you mean what you say, however, perhaps you should, since you just said that you might, if they existed, which they do.
As for whether you have an agenda: you are giving, I think, pretty clearly bad, inconsistent arguments that support your lifestyle and explicitly refusing to consider objections while griping about needing to deprogram your wife, etc. I think this is as good as the evidence you have provided of others having an agenda.
Woah we got Mr. smarty pants over here not even knowing basic supply and demand! Watch out, intellectuals!
You had me in the first half, then you completely went off the rails with "humanely raised" meat. How do I humanely raise and kill you?
Nice post! If you have the time and inclination, it would be helpful to write about continuing to eat animal products while giving to FarmKind, but sourcing your animal products from operations that are AWA-certified or better. By “better,” I mean farms that you have personally observed, researched, or spoken to the owners of yourself. Being vegan, while less convenient than default omnivorism, is nonetheless an easier default action if you’re an animal welfarist, but it is not the only way to abstain from supporting factory farms. You can remain an omnivore while getting your animal products from carefully vetted sources. These sources, while perhaps not pure under certain vegan ethical standards (such as animal rights or anti-exploitation), at least represent a major improvement in UTILITY compared to factory farms.
Additionally, there are tangible benefits to this approach, such as sending price signals into the economy that express demand for animal products sourced in an especially ethical way. This impact is unique and cannot be exactly replicated by initiatives like FarmKind (as far as I know). Though certainly, FarmKind is good to donate to, no matter what diet you follow.
Good point about market signals! Choosing more humane products is better than not doing so. However, you could arguably help even more animals by donating the price difference to super-effective charities. The charities FarmKind supports actually create similar market pressure, but at a much larger scale - for example, when The Humane League gets major companies to commit to cage-free eggs, they shift the purchasing of millions of customers at once.
Yes, I accept that that’s the case. In fact, buying ethically sourced animal products alone may be the least “effective” welfare intervention when stacked against simply being vegan or offsetting total omnivorism with effective animal charities, which are outrageously effective since animal welfare improvement is pathetically low-hanging fruit in altruism at the moment.
However, for ethical omnivores, becoming curious about the source of your food can be encouraging, making you feel like you’ve stepped into an alternative world of food that is intact already, ready to welcome you. And the network effects therein probably have their own behavioral gravitation, making it easier to stay the course and not be some lone “moral ranger” making decisions that literally no one else around you understands. Plus, it’s so rare to find operations that optimize for animal welfare (over other things like “organic,” “regenerative,” “sustainably raised,” etc.) that when you DO find one, AWA or not, you feel a desire to shower it with rewards and lock down your source for the next season!
Eating anything and then offsetting cheaply is, perhaps, the best “compromise” approach there is. Better than being strictly vegan, which is both difficult for most people to sustain in the current food system and perhaps overall less effective than offsetting a “cruel” diet; better than being flexitarian or reducetarian, which are unprincipled; and obviously much better than “eating anything” full stop.
But I’d argue that the best position for omnivores is the one where you give to effective charities AND source your animal products properly. It’s not the path of least resistance, but it’s not nearly as hard as strict veganism. You immediately enter into a market and social network that is actually pretty large compared to the ones that cater specifically to vegans. There are plenty of people in this market who will find your preferences intelligible and excitedly share what information they have (ethical farmers are proud of what they are and don’t tend to hide it). And, most importantly, you send market signals to the RIGHT places, and don’t risk pushing factory-farmed product inventories over their production thresholds with your (iterated) purchases, thus causing many new animals to be bred in factory farm conditions. Avoiding doing THAT is no small win for welfare.
“Properly sourced” animal products are significantly more expensive than the commonly available stuff. If our goal is to maximize expected utility, then <buying the cheapest available animal products + donating the extra money you’d have spent on the higher welfare stuff to the Shrimp Welfare Project or something similar> seems better than simply <buying the higher welfare stuff>.
Yes, and I stated above that buying factory-farmed products and offsetting is the best compromise position for expected utility. But of course, it’s not the single best behavior for expected utility, and if we really take that concept seriously, it pushes us into some weird corners of behavior space that are technically optimal but realistically psychologically unsustainable for most normal people.
I have recently transitioned into this “conscientious omnivorism” diet, and I was initially concerned about the cost differences, but they’ve been surprisingly marginal (so far!). Some welfare-certified products cost marginally more, some cost the same, and some actually cost less than their factory-farmed equivalents. One could argue for buying the literal cheapest options there are, sacrificing ingredient quality so they can offset with larger sums. But most people won’t think that way. They’ll land on a middle ground—buying food that’s only marginally (or not even) cheaper than humane options, and then offsetting. From the outside, this looks strange when they’re already so close to choosing humane products outright.
It remains an open question whether macrofarming can be reformed to such an extent that most consequentialist animal welfarists would be satisfied, or whether divestment will eventually become necessary. If factory farms are simply an environment that is suboptimal for animal welfare despite tinkering and marginal improvements via interventions by the charities that FarmKind works with, then, to be consistent, eventually we may just have to bite the bullet and become vegetarians, vegans, or conscientious omnivores. (That, or some other kind of market solution could swoop in to save the day—like actually delicious cultivated meat at scale.)
Ultimately, what I care about is how sustainable actions are. If someone can’t handle the marginal price increase of humane animal products or the research effort it takes to find reliable options AND afford donations to effective charities, then, at the very least, they should just give to charities and offset. But if they can do both, all the better. And if they can maintain veganism while giving to charities, better still. And if they can, in the limit, devote themselves to animal advocacy—working full-time for a high-impact organization, running local campaigns to shift consumer behavior, even funding new alternatives in the technology space—then wow, incredible gains in expected utility! But, you know, a very select few are ever going to do anything like that.