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.
That’s a clever website and approach to getting people to think about this issue.
I have thought about this a lot and am still developing my opinions fully, so I reserve the right to grow, but I think this approach simplifies the issue too much and preys on people in a way that causes them to miss some valid concerns.
Regenerative agriculture depends on animals to restore the land. It’s the only way to rebuild soil and ecosystems in a sustainable way (that I can see).
Animals are necessary and good BUT nature is cruel. I caught my cat torturing a mouse the other day for fun… he wasn’t even hungry. I have watched coyotes starve to death in bad drought. Deer waste away from chronic waste disease.
So we could eliminate suffering by eliminating animals. But that wouldn’t be good… for so many reasons. I don’t see that promoted by anyone.
We could eliminate OUR guilt in causing suffering by allowing them to exist in nature and never intervene or by domesticating them all. But nature is cruelly inhumane and economics won’t allow pets at the level needed for healthy ecosystems.
OR we could do our best to give them healthy lives, respect that death is part of that, and work to minimize suffering. This seems like a very reasonable approach. If we can use the animals in a productive way while allowing them to express their natural characteristics, build soil, contribute to regeneration of the land, and then slaughter them quickly and humanely for consumption… this seems like everyone wins.
I’d rather eat meat from an animal that had one bad day than an animal that suffered through the natural seasons driven to extremes by climate change, promoted by fossil fuels, extracted to help ravish their natural habit by clearing land by the millions of acres, plowing the land, destroying the soil, then propping it up with fossil fuel fertilizers and synthetic chemicals, to grow plants so that we don’t have eat animals.
Factory farms are a symptom of a broken system. I think we eat more meat than we should. I think if people did it right we would eat less meat and more plants, because that’s what a healthy and balanced ecosystem produces. I think shutting down the conversation with snide rebuttals like this causes people to miss out on important conversations and oversimplifies solutions.
(PS - I didn’t even start on my opinion about the selfishness involved in keep so many pets dogs in unnatural environments where they can’t express themselves. Breeding all sorts of health problems into them so they make better pets. Lots of dogs have good lives…. But many of them suffer immensely for our personal pleasure. Things aren’t always what they seem when you think deeply about them)
I think a similar argument could be made for marine suffering as a result of fertilizer runoff from traditional agricultural practices, for habitat destruction as a result of tillage based farming, and for desertification caused by both of these things. These will only get worse as soil depletion escalates and artificial nutrients are further used to prop it up.
Just because the suffering is several levels removed from us, doesn't mean we aren't responsible for it... and if suffering can't be eliminated, which I don't believe it can, we should feel a responsibility to minimize it.
Yes you could do that but I think you miss the point. I am afraid, long term, that will increase suffering. We need them for regenerative agriculture and to stop/reverse desertification. You don’t have to eat them in this process, but then you must leave them to nature which is full of suffering.
If animals aren’t necessary then I agree we should stop. If they are, then we need to be careful for unintended consequences.
You don't have to leave them to nature because we don't find them in nature. We breed them.
And if we didn't need to raise and breed billions of them, we wouldn't need to grow far more crops than we need to in order to feed them - instead of trying to use them to fend off desertification (you also don't need to kill the cows that help regenerate the land), going vegan would help curb a huge contributor to the deforestation you are arguing we need animal agriculture to remedy.
You are right about much of the desertification being caused by crops grown to feed animals. We do still need to restore that land and no, we don’t have to kill the cows we use to regenerate it, but they can’t live indefinitely so if we don’t leave them to nature (predation, drought, starving when their teeth are gone) we will have some hard decisions to make about what end of life care looks like.
I agree veganism would be preferable to what is happening now. I also concede it may be the best overall approach. I do think we need animals and at some point, either through action or inaction, will be forced to interact with some level of death and suffering. We can’t just not eat them and feel absolved from our responsibility toward them (which I’m not accusing you of saying, but I’m afraid is an easy trap to fall into).
I do appreciate the thoughtful challenges to my responses. I think I have some room to reconsider some things.
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.
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?
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.
You argument seems unclear to me. But I understand it as arguing that veganism increases insect populations, so it's worse that factory farming. I think two distinctions need to be made:
1. The capability of suffering experienced by, for example, a cow, is much greater than that of any insect.
2. Suffering experienced at the hands of humans is different than suffering experienced in the wild.
From point 1 I would argue that the suffering collective suffering of farmed animals is worse than the collective suffering of the insects that would exist otherwise.
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.
Well done on this article. You are actually providing a rational and reasonable solution, which many others do not offer. Though one thing: I thought eating pork was the worst, yet according to the calculator, it is better to consume pork than many of the other animal products. Any ideas?
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).
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 destroyed my digestive system. I experimented lots, even dialed it back and slowly eased back into the diet slowly, but I never managed to get accustomed to it. I had constant horrible horrible IBS/Crohns type symptoms. I also was perpetually hungry. Low energy (I had a physical job). I would get sick and get outbreaks of mouth ulcers when I got run down, etc.
As per the commenter below I was also taking supplements including b vits.
None of this happens now that I am back on a high meat, wild-game diet.
You were doing something badly wrong then, because plant-based diets don't do any of that.
It's possible you were allergic/sensitive to something that you only ate in your plant-based diet, in which case the GI issues could make sense. But it certainly wasn't the lack of meat, unless you have some rare condition, because those aren't normal side effects at all.
And this stuff:
> I also was perpetually hungry. Low energy (I had a physical job). I would get sick and get outbreaks of mouth ulcers when I got run down, etc.
just suggests you were eating very badly. If you were eating a normal, healthy plant-based diet, it should be just as satiating (as it would be full of protein, fibre and fats), and provide all the necessary micronutrients that should prevent ulcers etc (moreso than the typical omnivorous diet, in fact, because you would eat so many more vegetables, legumes, fruits etc.).
Your experience is just not something that can be credibly attributed to a plant-based diet, unless you're doing something almost comically wrong, or you have some very unusual condition that's never been observed before.
You are presuming a whole lot of knowledge about how I was going about my diet.
I was doing a lot of research. And I was largely eating the same stuff I had always been eating only in larger quantities to make up for the gap meat left in my diet (so allergies are unlikely). I had a very diverse diet, and was indeed eating lots of "legumes, fruits, etc". I was definitely not "eating very badly", at least according to the popular perspectives on diet that plant-based advocates ascribe to. Though now I have come to believe that eating vegan is indeed "eating badly".
Plant-based diets simply do not cause the issues you describe. You are either extraordinarily bad at feeding yourself, or you have an extremely rare, unknown condition, or you are lying.
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.
Yes, yes, this is why I buy my dog meat from https://www.elwooddogmeat.com/
Their dogs are:
Free-range
Local
Organic
Fresh, never frozen
Free from antibiotics
Sustainably raised
Humanely slaughtered!
Loved
lol, that's an interesting site. thanks for sharing
That’s a clever website and approach to getting people to think about this issue.
I have thought about this a lot and am still developing my opinions fully, so I reserve the right to grow, but I think this approach simplifies the issue too much and preys on people in a way that causes them to miss some valid concerns.
Regenerative agriculture depends on animals to restore the land. It’s the only way to rebuild soil and ecosystems in a sustainable way (that I can see).
Animals are necessary and good BUT nature is cruel. I caught my cat torturing a mouse the other day for fun… he wasn’t even hungry. I have watched coyotes starve to death in bad drought. Deer waste away from chronic waste disease.
So we could eliminate suffering by eliminating animals. But that wouldn’t be good… for so many reasons. I don’t see that promoted by anyone.
We could eliminate OUR guilt in causing suffering by allowing them to exist in nature and never intervene or by domesticating them all. But nature is cruelly inhumane and economics won’t allow pets at the level needed for healthy ecosystems.
OR we could do our best to give them healthy lives, respect that death is part of that, and work to minimize suffering. This seems like a very reasonable approach. If we can use the animals in a productive way while allowing them to express their natural characteristics, build soil, contribute to regeneration of the land, and then slaughter them quickly and humanely for consumption… this seems like everyone wins.
I’d rather eat meat from an animal that had one bad day than an animal that suffered through the natural seasons driven to extremes by climate change, promoted by fossil fuels, extracted to help ravish their natural habit by clearing land by the millions of acres, plowing the land, destroying the soil, then propping it up with fossil fuel fertilizers and synthetic chemicals, to grow plants so that we don’t have eat animals.
Factory farms are a symptom of a broken system. I think we eat more meat than we should. I think if people did it right we would eat less meat and more plants, because that’s what a healthy and balanced ecosystem produces. I think shutting down the conversation with snide rebuttals like this causes people to miss out on important conversations and oversimplifies solutions.
(PS - I didn’t even start on my opinion about the selfishness involved in keep so many pets dogs in unnatural environments where they can’t express themselves. Breeding all sorts of health problems into them so they make better pets. Lots of dogs have good lives…. But many of them suffer immensely for our personal pleasure. Things aren’t always what they seem when you think deeply about them)
Or you can just not use animals because you don't have to.
Here is an article, worth considering, about the unintended consequences of microplastics from vegan clothing:
https://www.extinction.today/p/vegan-clothes-are-killing-wildlife?r=2t8ijq&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
I think a similar argument could be made for marine suffering as a result of fertilizer runoff from traditional agricultural practices, for habitat destruction as a result of tillage based farming, and for desertification caused by both of these things. These will only get worse as soil depletion escalates and artificial nutrients are further used to prop it up.
Just because the suffering is several levels removed from us, doesn't mean we aren't responsible for it... and if suffering can't be eliminated, which I don't believe it can, we should feel a responsibility to minimize it.
I'm confident we want the same things.
Yes you could do that but I think you miss the point. I am afraid, long term, that will increase suffering. We need them for regenerative agriculture and to stop/reverse desertification. You don’t have to eat them in this process, but then you must leave them to nature which is full of suffering.
If animals aren’t necessary then I agree we should stop. If they are, then we need to be careful for unintended consequences.
You don't have to leave them to nature because we don't find them in nature. We breed them.
And if we didn't need to raise and breed billions of them, we wouldn't need to grow far more crops than we need to in order to feed them - instead of trying to use them to fend off desertification (you also don't need to kill the cows that help regenerate the land), going vegan would help curb a huge contributor to the deforestation you are arguing we need animal agriculture to remedy.
You are right about much of the desertification being caused by crops grown to feed animals. We do still need to restore that land and no, we don’t have to kill the cows we use to regenerate it, but they can’t live indefinitely so if we don’t leave them to nature (predation, drought, starving when their teeth are gone) we will have some hard decisions to make about what end of life care looks like.
I agree veganism would be preferable to what is happening now. I also concede it may be the best overall approach. I do think we need animals and at some point, either through action or inaction, will be forced to interact with some level of death and suffering. We can’t just not eat them and feel absolved from our responsibility toward them (which I’m not accusing you of saying, but I’m afraid is an easy trap to fall into).
I do appreciate the thoughtful challenges to my responses. I think I have some room to reconsider some things.
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.
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?
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!”
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?
You argument seems unclear to me. But I understand it as arguing that veganism increases insect populations, so it's worse that factory farming. I think two distinctions need to be made:
1. The capability of suffering experienced by, for example, a cow, is much greater than that of any insect.
2. Suffering experienced at the hands of humans is different than suffering experienced in the wild.
From point 1 I would argue that the suffering collective suffering of farmed animals is worse than the collective suffering of the insects that would exist otherwise.
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.
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.
Have you read the work of Timothy Hsiao? He is a young critic of ethical veganism and I would love to see you respond to his arguments.
Well done on this article. You are actually providing a rational and reasonable solution, which many others do not offer. Though one thing: I thought eating pork was the worst, yet according to the calculator, it is better to consume pork than many of the other animal products. Any ideas?
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).
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.
It destroyed my digestive system. I experimented lots, even dialed it back and slowly eased back into the diet slowly, but I never managed to get accustomed to it. I had constant horrible horrible IBS/Crohns type symptoms. I also was perpetually hungry. Low energy (I had a physical job). I would get sick and get outbreaks of mouth ulcers when I got run down, etc.
As per the commenter below I was also taking supplements including b vits.
None of this happens now that I am back on a high meat, wild-game diet.
You were doing something badly wrong then, because plant-based diets don't do any of that.
It's possible you were allergic/sensitive to something that you only ate in your plant-based diet, in which case the GI issues could make sense. But it certainly wasn't the lack of meat, unless you have some rare condition, because those aren't normal side effects at all.
And this stuff:
> I also was perpetually hungry. Low energy (I had a physical job). I would get sick and get outbreaks of mouth ulcers when I got run down, etc.
just suggests you were eating very badly. If you were eating a normal, healthy plant-based diet, it should be just as satiating (as it would be full of protein, fibre and fats), and provide all the necessary micronutrients that should prevent ulcers etc (moreso than the typical omnivorous diet, in fact, because you would eat so many more vegetables, legumes, fruits etc.).
Your experience is just not something that can be credibly attributed to a plant-based diet, unless you're doing something almost comically wrong, or you have some very unusual condition that's never been observed before.
You are presuming a whole lot of knowledge about how I was going about my diet.
I was doing a lot of research. And I was largely eating the same stuff I had always been eating only in larger quantities to make up for the gap meat left in my diet (so allergies are unlikely). I had a very diverse diet, and was indeed eating lots of "legumes, fruits, etc". I was definitely not "eating very badly", at least according to the popular perspectives on diet that plant-based advocates ascribe to. Though now I have come to believe that eating vegan is indeed "eating badly".
Yeah well I am presuming it because it's the only logical explanation for your issues.
Assuming, that is, that they are real.
> Though now I have come to believe that eating vegan is indeed "eating badly".
Well you believe wrong:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27886704/
Plant-based diets simply do not cause the issues you describe. You are either extraordinarily bad at feeding yourself, or you have an extremely rare, unknown condition, or you are lying.
Sure thing!
Great in theory but $23 to a charity seems suspect in several ways